The Hershey Aktie

Good morning. I'm Leah Jordan, the packaged food and food retail analyst at Goldman. And it is my pleasure to introduce the management team of Hershey. We have Steve Voskuil, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Dave Hulays, Senior Vice President of Finance; and Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you all for joining us today.

Pleasure.Thanks for having us.

So Hershey really needs little introduction. But as a quick refresher, it is one of the largest packaged food companies in the U.S. with a broad portfolio of iconic brands across confection and salty snacking, including Hershey's chocolate, Reese's, SkinnyPop and Dots pretzels. And I think before we get into our chat, I'll do -- I turn it over to Steve for some quick comments.

Yes. Thank you. Great to be here. Appreciate the interest in the stock. This is a unique time in history. We're coming off 2 years of unprecedented commodity inflation and now find ourselves in this unique position to both rapidly recover margins, but also invest for long-term growth. And as we look to this business, we're coming off a period of price-driven top line growth, but know that the best healthy business is going to have a mix of volume and price going forward. And what's great about this business, aside from a resilient category and iconic brands is that we have good visibility into the plan for 2026 and 2027. And so we're excited to get to tell that story today.

I think you see...

Great to have you all. Maybe just to start us off, following up to those comments, Hershey has had a number of headwinds across the industry over the last few years, but the company seems to be emerging even stronger now. You have laid out long-term plans recently at your Investor Day, and you have elevated growth expectations through '27, a return to algo beyond that. So maybe just at a high level, you could just talk about the key drivers underlying your confidence in that longer-term outlook at this point.

Sure. I will start with what you said, Leah. -- we are stronger coming out than we were going in. We had always a commitment to driving a disciplined P&L and disciplined growth strategy. The pressure from commodities in the last few years made that even sharper. And so in addition to regular gross margin focus and growth focus, we've been able to sharpen that, drive deeper cost savings focus and invest into the things that we know are going to drive growth long term.

And so as part of this recovery, we have invested in their brands in a more significant way. We have invested in areas like R&D to make us more long-term competitive on innovation. We have invested in our retail sales team and in particular, the technology that will allow them to be even more efficient than they are so far. We will have the opportunity to invest in innovation.

And so when I look across all of those growth-driving investments and when I look across our ability to continue to manage with discipline, the rest of our P&L and our cost structure, those are the things that give us confidence in the outlook. I'd say our head is not in the fan. We see the macros that you all see. We see GLP-1s, we see SNAP, I am sure we will talk about those. More recently, we see the pressure from fuel prices. But even with all of those and the state they are in, we have confidence in the outlook because we are deep into each of those areas, and they are performing inside the expectations that we set when we established our plan for this year and for 2027.

And then I think we are going to jump right into some of those things that you said we would. So the macro backdrop remains dynamic. Maybe just you could talk about your recent consumption trends you are seeing, how resilient has demand been against those macro pressures and especially things like changing terms for SNAP as well as even GLP-1s?

Sure. So I will come to those macros and maybe just say at the start, we acknowledge how difficult it's been through the first quarter to get a good triangulation on the base business. We are always affected by seasonal timing. We have sometimes shipments move from one quarter to another to respond to the season. And when you look at the year-over-year lap, it's difficult through Q1 to say, hey, what's happening? What's the clear signal on the core business? -- that's going to get a lot easier from here going forward through the balance of Q2 as we start to see the data gets a lot cleaner.

We don't have that seasonal noise and some of the other shipment noise. So as that signal gets clear, you're going to see some of these things play out in real time. From a SNAP and GLP-1 standpoint, inside the company, we've got a pod that focuses on each of these areas. And that pod looks at outside data, it looks at receipt data, it looks at research. And we want to be as much as we can be experts in our categories on those 2 spaces. In fact, by coincidence, our pod on SNAP is actually in Texas this week, doing shopper intercepts, one-on-one interviews with SNAP consumers, understanding how they're making choices and trade-offs, the difficulty of shopping as retailers execute some of these new waivers.

And so that is just one part of the data that we are bringing back inside and then using to test and assess our plans and so forth. As we look across the consumer landscape and notwithstanding those challenges, we believe we have got those consumer pressures embedded inside our outlook. Obviously, there's sort of a defensive piece of, hey, this is happening, how are we going to react?

But there's also the proactive side. In the case of SNAP, how can we partner with retailers to make it easier to shop to find things that are acceptable in the waiver environment and help shoppers find the product in the confection space and ours in particular, that will help that they can purchase. In the case of GLP-1s, you heard Kirk talk about helping with breadth and refreshment or protein to make sure that we've got products that are going to be able to participate in the need for protein. So as we think about the consumer in these dynamics, there's the role of understanding and testing our plans and then also finding ways to capitalize where we can against these trends. And again, as we sit here today, everything is sitting inside the impact that we expected.

That's great to hear. And I know we will all be happy to get past the seasonality to just see the normalized trends. But you have a strong seasonal business, so that's always going to come. And then maybe kind of broadening off of that topic, I mean, demand overall pretty healthy, but you've taken significant inflation-based pricing over the last year or so. What are you seeing in terms of elasticity on the back of that? How do you think about sustainability of that pricing action if we should see more macro pressure on the consumer? Or what other levers do you still have beyond pricing as well?

Sure. So our retail sales team is in stores, multiple stores every single week. And we, as a leadership team, have a meeting every week where we review what they're seeing on shelf, what's happening or not happening on price, innovation, velocities, et cetera. And so we are very close to what's happening on shelf from a pricing standpoint. As we talked about on our last earnings call, and it remains true here, elasticities are playing out more favorably than our original expectations. I'd say it's sort of stabilized at the level that it's at. We'll continue to monitor that, but more favorably than we expected. And we see that because these are iconic brands and emotive brands, they're precious in seasons and family events.

And the category in general has continued to be rational. And so that's one component of how we kind of keep an eye on the pricing side and the elasticity side. We have other levers. Obviously, list price is just one piece. We also look at price pack architecture. And I would say we have a very good revenue management team inside the company that looks at ways to also with -- in partnership with retailers to drive more category sales and category dollars. Some of that price pack architecture, in fact, is rolling into the market as we speak.

Long term, we know that the model of the last 2 years, which is largely price-driven top line growth is not the sustainable model. We want a more balanced price and volume component. That's part of our algorithm. And so that's one of the reasons why these reinvestments back into things that will help drive volume and consumer engagement and retailer support and merchandising are part of our plan going forward.

That's great. And then maybe just building on this discussion around market share. I think there has been a lot of noise in the data that everyone looks at. Maybe you could talk about what's impacting recent market share trends, highlight where you've been winning? And then how do you expect market share to evolve as we move through the year?

Dave, I'm going to give you a chance to...

Yes, sure. So year-to-date market share, overall, I'd say retail has been in line with our expectations. Seasons has been in line with our expectations. Our core chocolate portfolio has been under more pressure. Really, it's about timing of innovation and shelf changes and shelf placement.

We feel good about what we have coming in Q2 from a distribution standpoint as well as the tentpoles and the merchandising. So we feel good about what's coming and us sequentially building back from that share position. The piece that is, I'd say, higher than what we expected is the premium segment continues to do well. We have some plans within our portfolio to go deeper into that segment, but a lot of our premiumization initiatives are going to happen in 2027. So we have that in our line of sight there. But in the meantime, we feel good about the programming that we have at this point for, including shelf resets that just happened in spring in a lot of the food retailers.

The only thing I would add to that is we care deeply, obviously, about market share. And -- but we're also not going to invest unwisely to try to compete in a segment where, hey, it's growing like crazy, but we just have a foothold. So let's spend a lot more money in some place else to compensate. That doesn't fit the way we manage the P&L. We want to drive good ROI, smart investment.

We'll have some premiumization strategies coming later this year and next year that will get at that component in a bigger way, but Dave did a great job summarizing.

That's great. That's a well-balanced approach, and I know you play in many categories. But kind of going back to that discussion around innovation, and I do think some of this in the first half of the year was around timing. It sounds like you've got a lot more on shelf space to come. A lot of the innovation and tentpole events are still on the come. So maybe provide more color. It sounded like premiumization, but maybe of the plans or what you're willing to share today, what can we look forward to as we look ahead?

Yes. I'll maybe touch on the tentpole piece, and then Marie, you can talk a little bit about the innovation that's coming, both exciting.

So tentpole is kind of an opportunity that was always there that we probably didn't take as good of advantage of as we could have. We're great in seasons. That's part of the reason the retail sales team is so impactful as they can help retailers merchandise effectively seasonally. And the notion is, hey, how do we take that strength and leverage it in the shoulders in between seasons, but also not just the seasons, which are the same every year, but things that are culturally relevant and always changing and bringing in new demographics, new consumers, younger in some cases, consumers into the brand. And that's really some of the opportunity in the tentpoles.

And tentpoles will be different every year. This year, we've got some unique ones, obviously, coming up with America 250. We've got the Hershey movie coming later this year. Those are unique. But every year has some unique events that we'll be able to tap into. And it's really to say, hey, let's bring all the strengths we have of seasons to bear on these shoulder seasons and create more goodness in between the big events. And the sales team is energized by this.

I think we're energized because it's going to give us more, let's say, cultural relevance in some of these things. Year-to-year, it will look different, but it's a real opportunity to expand on the strength. Innovation is really important. We've got some good things coming that we can share for this year, including Q2 and beyond, and teas are probably for next year.

Yes. So right now, we have our spring items out. So we've got the Reese's Marshmallow, the Reese's peanut butter and jelly. We've got new flavors across our Suites portfolio and Jolly Rancher that are all hitting the markets or will be in the market over the next -- with merchandising vehicles over the next couple of months. And then as we get to the back half, we'll also continue the news going on core items while we introduce that accessible premium item with the Hershey Krackel bar that will be coming out in time for back-to-school season. And then as we look ahead, the innovation and R&D investments that we're making this year will help us to build to a more -- a pipeline of innovation for '27 that will be more incremental, a bit more disruptive across some of those growth spaces that we laid out at Investor Day.

Great. Yes. I know a lot will still be asking on into the fall as we get closer to '27, it sounds like. But it sounds like you're going to be pushing the envelope, I guess, in innovation in the back half and into next year. We've talked about premiumization, but making balanced ROIC decisions. But I guess if we could take a high-level look like long term, where do you see the confection portfolio for Hershey evolving over time? I think you continue to do really well in legacy brands, right? Hershey, Reese's is still growing double digits even after all of these years, but then there's a lot of opportunity in other categories. So just how meaningful could the expansion into premium ultimately be?

And how do you see that evolution?

Sure. I'll start at the way Kirk did at the investor conference is the core is super important. So despite all of these expansion opportunities and exciting the core is the most important. And so as we talked about at the investor conference, we still have opportunities for distribution on the core. And so that is a big focus. We want our top 70 SKUs everywhere. And as you saw, we still have opportunities for more distribution points for that. So that is job one. That is actually the funding source for some of the investments.

So we want to make sure that we execute that well. Then we look at where the consumer is going, and we talked about premium and premiumization. We don't have permission to play in all parts of premium and premium is a big space. And we're not in the ultra-premium. That's probably not where we -- our brands have permission to play.

But there are parts of premium that we can participate in, some with existing brands where they can push up with permission into that space and potentially with new brands. And so that will get some attention. Again, in the grand scheme of the company, it's still a relatively small bet, but it's a rapidly growing space. Consumers are there, and we should be there as a category leader. Functional snacking is another one that Kirk talked about. We've got one in the portfolio. We've got Fulfill in the portfolio.

This is a place also, again, partly in light of the macros where these brands can get a more focused attention than what we have had in the past. And we believe that we're going to make some smart investment in these spaces, but also take advantage of some of those macros to make sure that we're playing a good role that we have permission to play in the functional space. We'll look at sweets. We've made great progress with Jolly Ranchers. We have more room to grow there. That segment of the category probably softened a little bit, but our opportunity to grow in that space and grow the category in that space is still strong.

And then getting to salty and the opportunities we have in that part. I'm sure we'll get to a question on salty. Anything I'm forgetting there Anoori?

No, I would just say we laid out the 40% ambition. So it's -- we're going to be on a journey. All of those places will play a role, but we haven't necessarily laid out exactly like the contribution. It's going to depend on where the consumer is.

You'll see a big step forward in '27 in all the places that Steve talked about.

Okay. Great. Yes, that -- again, still a lot to look forward to and still doing a lot of strength in the core. So firing on all cylinders there. And then you kind of teed me up the next part.

On salty, you've built up a tremendous salty business over the last few years. You continue to gain a lot of share. You're outgrowing the category and really bucking the trend there. Maybe can you just talk about why is your portfolio resonating in this environment in the salty space? And then how much more opportunity do you see to expand distribution for the brands that you have today or just in growth going forward?

Yes, we love this portfolio and great foresight by the team at the time that got us in with SkinnyPop. And then I think some great additions -- organic expansion but then great additions to the portfolio. And I'll say we're pleased with all parts of it. Even today, as we look at it, there are parts we can do better. So we talked about Pirate's Booty at the investor conference. You have small in the grand scheme of things, but that brand probably hasn't been refreshed in my time with Hershey. And in a way, shame on us, it's a great product. It resonates in kids snacking, where we have permission life.

So even the smallest part has opportunities to grow. But we're in the middle of integrating LesserEvil, and that's going great, right on plan. We'll have opportunities to scale that up. So that will clearly be a distribution opportunity for us, kind of taking the same playbook that we have with Dot's, which was to take a strong regional brand with unique differentiation and basically blow it through our playbook and put it in the hands of our sales team and go to work. And so as I look across all parts of the salty portfolio, I'm really pleased with what they're doing.

They're all differentiated in some ways. And I think that's one of the reasons we've been able to be successful. And in fact, as we think about expansion of that portfolio, we will always be looking for something that's unique and differentiated and sustainably differentiated from others. And it gives us this place, as Kirk would say, to be the insurgent brand inside this space, unlike where we are with confection. And in addition to the top line opportunity in that business, we have a margin opportunity as well. We're still integrating those businesses, especially LesserEvil. We had the benefit a few years ago of putting that business and the confection business on the same new ERP platform, which has driven efficiency. And now with our new One Hershey operating model, that will drive additional opportunities for margin enhancement on the salty business as we have more integrated customer conversations, more integrated activations in store and more scaled resources across the 2 businesses. So yes, very enthusiastic about the salty business.

Great. And you're gaining share, you're doing very well. We have heard competitors adjust their pricing. Maybe just any quick comments around the competitive environment today in that category.

Yes. I would say for us, stable. We know a large competitor has changed the pricing strategy.

We don't look at that pricing or that competitor's pricing as the bellwether for our brands. Again, we're not competing necessarily in the same space as we have a differentiated different role than some of those do. So we don't look at that pricing decision or those pricing decisions as an automatic trigger to the way we think about pricing. We really -- like the other businesses, we want to have a balance of volume and price over time that makes sense, what resonates with consumers and recognizing that we're driving a lot of category growth.

Great. And I think we have to get to cocoa. We don't think that topic is said. But we've seen a lot of pressure from that cost -- input cost for you over the last couple of years. It's come down, providing an opportunity for margin recovery, although we have seen it tick up a little bit here more recently. So maybe just anything you're seeing around the recent movement in the commodity? What's your visibility on your coverage as you look out ahead?

And -- also longer term, how do you think about just mitigation strategies over time, be it hedging, be it sourcing or anything there?

Sure. On the current market, we still meet every other week with our cocoa team out of Geneva and talk what's happening on the fundamentals. And one of the things I think we talked about before, we have more visibility into the fundamentals, whether it's pollinization trends, weather trends, fertilizer use, pod counts than we ever had before. So I guess the good to come out of the high cocoa price. But our fundamental belief is we still are in a supply excess standpoint on the physical side of cocoa right now and in the demand -- still a reduced demand environment.

So on the fundamentals alone, we would say there's probably still opportunity for cocoa to come down from where it certainly where it is, let's say, in the last couple of days.

That said, it's also wrapped up in the financial market and the financial market implications are less easy to call, and that's part of where the hedging program comes in is to say, listen, we will have a strong point of view on what we think the fundamentals are going to look like. And to your point, our supply chain is much more diversified than it was maybe 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. So we're much less reliant on one particular region for our cocoa. But what the hedging program allows us to do is diversify also the financial implications.

And so the fundamentals of the policy haven't really changed the last couple of years. We've got guardrails. We're not trying to corner the cocoa market. We are trying to smooth the impacts over time, give us visibility. So if we do need to make pricing decisions, we have enough runway to be able to work that through our system and ultimately manage that volatility. We've added a few things, a few capabilities we didn't have, the ability to buy direct source cocoa, which we did a few times over the last few years. But fundamentally, our risk management philosophy hasn't fundamentally changed. And I would say, again, with the diversification in our cocoa supply chain, it's probably taken the overall risk level down from like a physical regional dependence standpoint. But anything, Dave, you'd add?

No, we have visibility, good visibility in '26 and into '27 as well, which gives us sort of confidence in the plans that we have. Obviously, there's more hedging to go do, but we have time to do that.

That's great to hear. Okay. And I think kind of building on that discussion, I think when you laid out your plans for '27 and into '26, we're in this path of a margin recovery and you have the visibility on the cocoa side, one of your biggest inputs there. But as a broader discussion, and I know this comes up a lot with investors, as you look longer term, how do you think about your ability to get back to kind of your high watermark of gross margins in that mid-40s range? I mean, as you think about potential shifts, should grow at a faster rate or anything around there? Maybe just long-term path.

Yes. I mean our aspiration is still to restore our margins back into that domain. I want to say we're going to -- I don't want to say we're going to hit the high watermark, and that's like the end goal, but getting back into the domain of where our margins were before Cocoa is still the enterprise goal. Now having said that, we also want to make sure that we're driving dollars. And so one of the things we're doing by driving volume growth is bringing in new consumers and bringing more dollars in as well.

So that will be the toggle as we look forward. We want to get our margins back to the range they were in before, but we also want to bring in incremental gross margin dollars because the dollars allow the reinvestment and so on. As we look at our plans going forward, we're confident in our ability to be able to do that, probably more confident now than we were before Cocoa because of some of the financial discipline that we put in place incrementally as part of the Cocoa pressure we had in the last 2 years. We are leaner behind -- in the back office than we were before. We've got common data platform. We've got, like everybody, right, leveraging AI, not just to drive savings, but really to drive impact and efficiency. Our supply chain teams are constantly looking for ways to drive further savings and integration.

And so as I look across that whole piece, I feel confident in our ability to not only recover margins back into that range, but then to have really good choices and trade-offs around, hey, do I go further? I take that to reinvest on the basis of a good ROI to drive consumer engagement and volume. And these will be the good problems that I think we're going to have for the next couple of years.

Yes. Much better than watching every pod count of cocoa.

So okay, I think as we kind of pull together pieces of the chat, right, there's momentum across your portfolio. There's visibility on cocao, you're managing and executing better than you have. And so as you look at your outlook for '26, maybe just what are the biggest risks you're watching? And if things come in better than you expect, how do you think about those trade-offs today versus reinvestment versus kind of flow-through at this point?

Yes. The things that we are going to watch the most is our execution. The plan for this year is pretty loaded with the tentpoles and the seasons. We want to execute excellently against all of those components. That's sort of job one. We are continually monitoring the macro. So if something changes or deviates in a material way, clearly, that will be something we have our eye on. I think we'll have good visibility into that because of the pods. -- and their engagement and what's happening at the consumer level.

But our job is to really make sure we execute and then also lay the foundations and the rest of the building structure underneath the '27 plans. And I think if we do overdeliver this year, again, we'll have that opportunity to decide how much we drop through for this year or if there are great ROI opportunities to enhance '27. I would say that our plan as we sit here today, we've got a pretty good '27 plan, like we've got a pretty sufficient level of investment.

And so the default isn't going to be to just sort of save it for next year. I think we're going to allow some of that to flow through this year as well, assuming we have that upside. So that answer.

That's very helpful. Yes. No. And always like every company, right, we've got to watch the macro and things are always shifting, but that's very helpful color. Maybe next, you could just talk about capital allocation because it does seem momentum is at your back. You've got a solid balance sheet.

You continue to improve the business. So maybe how are you prioritizing today? How does that change? And then any other broader comments around M&A and how that fits as you think about the portfolio?

Sure. Dave, do you want to talk capital allocation?

Yes. So our capital allocation strategy has always been the same. We -- given the pressure over the last couple of years with Cocoa, we've been very strict with our cash, and we've managed to get back to a point where we're now back to generating cash the way we always have. So with that, we've taken our dividend back up into the range of where we -- where our strategy says we should have it and where we want it. We continue to invest back in the business and feel really good about those investments that we're making there. Leverage is in a good spot, et cetera.

So as we continue to generate cash, we're obviously just considering the options and the optionality around it. And if we don't have strong ROI organic investments to make and if there isn't anything complementary that meets our strict criteria from an M&A standpoint, then we consider giving back to shareholders. And so we've got a bit of activity we've already done around replenishment this year, and we're thinking about that as well as we think about the remainder of the year.

And on the M&A side, I would say, as I always say, we don't want any asset to trade in our space that we don't have a point of view on. And if we have interest to be in that dialogue. And our M&A team is great at connecting businesses large to small. Some of the small ones, we can make early investments to see how it plays out, and we want to be in every dialogue. So that hasn't changed. But what I always say the caveat is we are picky. We want things that are going to drive shareholder value.

We want things that are going to give us a differentiated position of strength, something that is, over time, has the ability to fit inside our margin structure and fit inside our portfolio in a way that's additive and earns its capital, its return on capital compared to the other investments we could look at. So with that said, we're always looking, but we're also going to be very picky about what fits this portfolio.

Yes, I think that makes sense. And I think I have time for one more, and this is one I was hoping we would get to. But productivity has been a big focus for Hershey. I know you talked about a long time, a lot of cost savings. I think one of the big things that came out earlier this year is this shift to a One Hershey model. So maybe can you just tell us what's changing about how you operate today? Why are you making this change now? And maybe any early learnings? I know it's very early, but as you've implemented it?

Sure. There were 2 key enablers to being able to do this. One is the IT system that I mentioned before, getting all the business on one common platform. Before that, it would have been hard to integrate data and integrate decisions. The second was, frankly, the scale of the salty business. We never wanted to get the salty business inside a bigger conversation until it was -- its core was healthy, and we had great discipline and management around that. With those 2 boxes ticked, then when Hershey started to become a reality.

And I'll say this was driven as much by customers as it was by us. Prior to this, we would go to customers and have 3 different dialogues. We talk about functional snacking, we come back and talk about salty and then we come back and talk about confection. And customers were saying, "Hey, can we do this more efficiently? And so it was really a meeting of both those where we can have more impact when we're sitting together at the table representing all these businesses. It's more efficient for customers. And we can leverage the different parts of the portfolio with each other.

And the example we've talked about is 4th of July, big salty snacks time. So we've got a seat of the conversation with our salty snacks portfolio, but we really didn't have a seat on the confection side. I mean you don't think about eating chocolate necessarily on a hot summer day, but our sweets portfolio is perfect in some of these events. And so for the first time, we've been able to integrate those kind of conversations, say, hey, how does our whole portfolio play for an event like that? We'll see it again with the tentpoles. We'll see it again with the Seasons.

And so on that level, the top line level really reached a point of maturity where this made a lot of sense. If you click below that, though, it also makes sense because we also have the ability now with a more integrated supply chain because of that data platform. We have the ability to share scale across marketing resources, activation activity, the retail sales team. And Salty, they never -- they were never neglected, but they have access to a bigger portfolio of capabilities probably than they have before.

And so all of that together, and it wasn't cost driven, but there's some cost benefit and margin benefit to the business as well from that. All of those are the reasons why we felt, hey, this is the time to bring these together. It's really primarily driven by top line growth opportunities with a kind of one [indiscernible] around efficiencies, scaled capabilities and a little bit of cost savings as well.

That's very helpful color. This has been tremendous insights into your business and a lot for us to look forward to. And we do eat smores. I love hot summer day.

Try the caramel one in there. It's very good.

It has lots of options. So I think we'll leave it there. Thank you very much. here.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Greetings, and welcome to the Hershey Company First quarter 2026 question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the call over to your host, Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations for the Hershey Company. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Hershey Company's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Q&A session. I hope everyone has had the chance to read our press release and listen to our prerecorded management remarks,, both of which are available on our website. In addition, we have posted a transcript of the prerecorded remarks. At the conclusion of today's live Q&A session, we will also post a transcript and audio replay of this call.

Please note that during today's Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements, including expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release and the company's SEC filings.

Finally, please note that we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide useful information for investors. The information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. A Reconciliations for the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release.

Joining me today are Hershey's President and CEO, Kirk Tanner; and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil. With that, I will turn it over to the operator for the first question.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question comes from the line of Andrew Lazar with Barclays.

I was hoping maybe to focus in a little bit on North America confectionery to start. I think in the press release, you mentioned that lower year-over-year CMG market share due to increased marketplace competition. And I know investors are understandably sensitive to this, just given the significant drop in cocoa prices of late and the concern that this could lead to sort of incremental competitive activity to spur volumes in light of elasticity.

So I was maybe hoping you could dig into just what you're seeing in the marketplace a bit more? And what would you would expect as some of the activations and tentpole events sort of kick in? And would you, I guess, anticipate that Hersey returns to share growth either in 2Q or as we move through the year?

Yes. Great question. Yes. I'd start with competition continues to be highly rational. There's no change in the pricing environment. I just want to start with that. We have seen increased competitive innovation and merchandising from both mainstream and premium competitors. That's what makes this category so attractive to consumers. It's one of the reasons it's so resilient. And so some of that happened a little earlier than we expected.

We feel really good about our position as we exit spring resets in a net positive position across items and key channels and our spring and summer merchandising programs ramp up. Premium chocolate continues to be that segment that grows really well. But we are charging into that space aggressively. And we have plans in the back half of this year to have some innovation, and we'll continue to develop that.

But overall, yes, we're in a competitive environment. We feel good about where we're going. We have momentum planned for the second half of the year that we feel really good about. But it is a rational pricing environment, Andrew.

Great. That's really helpful. And then you mentioned Easter sell-through was ahead of expectation. I guess it looks like maybe share was a bit weaker just in the past few weeks of data. I was just hoping you could sort of square those 2 things for us. And I guess how is Easter share sort of versus your expectations?

Yes. I mean I look at the category in the first quarter. Overall, the category in confectionary was really resilient, growing high single digit. Overall, Easter was good for us. Category sales declined really due to the 2 fewer weeks versus last year, but our sell-through was really strong and outperformed our expectations. I'd say that's the notable part, given that Hershey share -- we're a share leader at the season, and we typically index much higher.

And so the 2 weeks was a big impact on the overall season. But we're very happy with our performance and the sell-through that we saw those exceeded our expectation, and our share was also ahead of our expectations coming out of Easter.

Our next question comes from the line of Megan Klepp with Morgan Stanley.

Great. Maybe I could -- I wanted to start on the macro. When we sat here 2.5 months ago, I think the initial outlook you provided included what you called prudent assumptions, which you reiterated today. But obviously, since then, the backdrop has gotten more challenging. You talked in your remarks, there's elevated geopolitical uncertainty and we're seeing higher gas prices as a result. So wondered if maybe you could just in terms of what you've seen in the macro so far relative to your expectations, particularly on things like SNAP, where maybe you have a little bit more data -- and then just broadly, as you sit here today, do you think the guidance that you have for the remainder of the year still kind of gives you the same degree of cushion on the macro as you thought in the beginning of the year.

Yes, really, really relevant question. Thanks for that. Consumer behavior, let's just kind of start with this quarter and then as we move through the year, but consumer behavior remained really steady throughout the quarter with shoppers making thoughtful choices. GLP-1 trends remain consistent. Net impact was mild given waivers were limited to 5 states and higher gas prices had minimal effects. We continue to monitor those very closely.

But overall, the macro environment is tracking within our expectations of the year. When we talk about SNAP specifically, we realistically modeled the possible effects right from the beginning. In the first quarter, the 5 steps -- the 5 states that were in place, which means the overamp impact was, as I mentioned, pretty mild or minor -- in those states, they affect both the category and our business aligned with our estimates, which gives us much more confidence for the full year outlook.

Now where implemented, we do see considerable consumer confusion and it's possible that, that would improve over time. So we plan for this headwind to increase over the course of the year with SNAP, and we will adjust our plans to meet the needs of the consumer with portfolio pack types but it's in our assumption. I think that's the important thing. We're not seeing anything that's kind of out of how we've modeled the year and our outlook for the year. So I think that stays on track as far as SNAP goes.

Great. That's helpful. And maybe just a related question on elasticities. Last quarter, you talked about planning for around 0.8% even though actuals are running better and talked about that as maybe being potential upside to your expectations for the guidance. This quarter, you talked about elasticity is seeing favorable versus planned levels. So -- has anything changed in April so far? Or are you still embedding that same level of conservatism on elasticity for the balance of the year?

And as we think about the second quarter and what's implied from an organic sales growth perspective, how much of that is just the shipment timing and use reversing versus maybe something more fundamental in how you're thinking about demand?

Yes, I'll kick that over to Steve for that one.

Sure. Yes. On the elasticity, you said , we continue to model what we have before that point. We're pleased is still holding. We have some things that will be coming to market, price pack architecture, for example, hitting shelves right now. So we'll continue to watch that to see if elasticity has evolved as they can sometimes. But right now, right in line with what we've -- better than what we've modeled and expect that to continue. And then relative to Q2 -- our Q2 sales expectations, yes, the biggest piece is on the organic side were the timing issues.

Two parts to that. Kirk said Easter sell-through was strong. And so 1 upshot from that was earlier shipping of some of our spring program, including Smores, for example, which is actually getting activated as we speak. That's earlier than we typically would have seen. We also had a little bit of pull forward internationally at some customers were doing playing a little bit of defense trying to get ahead or often trying to get ahead of potential disruption in the Middle East. So those were the 2 big pieces that sort of pull things forward from our standpoint, nothing structurally different relative to Q2 expectations.

Our next question comes from the line of Peter Galbo with Bank of America.

Steve, maybe if I can -- if I could pick up on the back of Megan's question there on 2Q organic sales. I think be implied, is that confection organic may actually dip negative in the second quarter, just given some of the timing aspects. So I just wanted to press on that a little bit, just as a clarification point.

Yes, it is expected to be slightly down in Q2 due to that timing that we just talked about.

Okay. Great. And then just a broader question, Steve, in terms of just the margin cadence over the rest of the year, obviously, there was a little bit of favorability, I think, on the gross margin side. maybe because of some of the volume, but maybe you can just help us think about gross margin phasing over the back 3 quarters of the year.

Sure. we're expecting in Q2 gross margins to increase by nearly 300 basis points versus the prior year period. So that's where you really start to see the inflection. And then as we get to the back half of the year, we expect something great basis points. And again, we've got the year pretty well planned out. So I'd say we have good visibility to that. But that's how that inflection starts in Q2 and then accelerates in the back half.

Our next question comes from the line of Peter Grom with UBS.

Great. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. So Kirk, in your prepared remarks, you touched on some of the drivers that you believe will keep topline momentum in the back half of the year as you annualize pricing impact. So can you maybe just unpack that a bit more? And maybe more specifically, what's the degree of visibility or level of confidence on that momentum or that momentum can be sustained as you look ahead?

Yes. Good question. Yes, we have confidence in H2, driven by a few things. One, we see a really strong seasons plan for the second half. Our tentpole will deliver a full point of growth Americana, the Hershey movie, we've got a lot built into that, a lot of support from our customers. Resets have been really important. So gains across several channels, mass, grocery, dollar, drug.

So we see a positive position coming out of the spring resets, which is important to us. And then innovation. That -- we've got good innovation. We'll have a big innovation on Hershey's in the fall as well that we're really excited about gets us into that accessible premium space. So that is really important. Now of course, we're watching the macros just like everyone. But when we think about what we can control we feel really good, and we have a lot of confidence in where we're going as we ramp up our execution and deliver against our plan. So we feel good about H2. Again, we'll keep an eye on the macro and control what we can control.

No, that's great and very helpful. And then just a follow-up on snacks. -- a strong quarter at 5%, but I think it's a bit below what we see in terms of consumption. And in the remarks, you touched on plant reduction and private label production and product recall. So do those items account for the entire gap relative to what we see in consumption? And then maybe specifically, any thoughts around how we should be thinking about growth for this segment moving forward, especially just in the context of the implied guidance?

Yes. One thing that I would say on snacks are on our salty snacks is -- that's primarily driven by private label. And so our core brands in salty are up nearly 10%. So that is not the issue. Now -- as you know, as we brought those businesses in, we had a private label business that's getting smaller in our business over time. So that's a bit of it. Our salty brands are doing exceptionally well.

Yes. I'll just say in terms of the profitability side, you really pointed to the 2 things. We had a couple of discrete things, the voluntary withdrawal is actually immaterial in total, but that combined with the delayed opening of the DC meant that we spent more on logistics, trying to -- with a fast-growing business, trying to maintain strong service. And so those additional costs were incurred in the quarter, they're done.

And so now we're in a better spot than we expect operating income to grow and increase by double-digit small speed bump in the first quarter, but passed it and back on track.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Carey with Wells Fargo Securities.

Can I just follow up on the Snacks margin. So obviously, kind of some discrete headwinds in the quarter, relatively low watermark on margins. You talked about accelerating profit from here. Is that mostly driven by just the sequential improvement in margins as opposed to, say, top line? And then do you still feel good about the margin targets that you had put out there at Investor Day. Just maybe you contextualize that and then I have a follow-up.

Yes, the margin will improve on the basis of just not having those onetime issues. That will be the biggest factor. We are going to have some amortization that will come along with the LesserEvil acquisition. So that's sort of in the base and there's some mix impact with LesserEvil in the mix at a kind of total salty level. But those are expected. And aside from that, you kind of on the core business, we'll continue to see that margin improvement over the course of the year.

Okay. And just a follow-up on the spring resets. A lot of exciting activity from here. Can you just give us a bit more insight on some of the key wins how you expect those benefits to come through and some of the timing.

Yes. Yes. I think about those 2 things, space in the number of new facings, new SKUs that we have in the sets across the primary channels across mass, dollar, drug and grocery, that's a big part. So winning at the shelf is the first thing I think about, and we're in a positive position there.

The second is the support that we're getting from retailers on the perimeter with our tentpole events. I think the combination of both winning at the shelf and winning on the perimeter supported by our retail sales team is really get, but it really is both winning across DMG and Salty for both shelf space wins and perimeter into. And we're tracking that. We're very disciplined about looking at that every single week. So we feel really good about where we're going.

Our next question comes from the line of Leah Jordan with Goldman Sachs.

You noted a mild impact from higher gas prices on the consumer. But just if you could provide more color on how your sales have trended in the C-store channel specifically and how you think about potentially supporting that channel if these macro challenges sustain?

Yes. We made those comments early in Q1, right, we saw a very little impact because it was a later event. I think it really comes to how high the prices go and how long they stay. C-store is the right question to ask. We look at that as well, and our confection business continues to perform in line and we look at things like our immediate consumption business. And those continue to do well through this time.

Again, we know that this is a little longer issue that could have a bigger impact. But right now, we see that performance standing in check. And so we feel good about that. But we're always staying focused on that and looking for other things that we can do with our retail partners in the convenience channel to keep the business part in mind. We know that when high gas prices happen, frequency goes up with consumers. So they come to the gas station more, they buy less. They are purchasing less, but the frequency goes up, that keeps the channel robust, at least with our category.

And again, we continue to see results as expected right now. So we're feeling good about it, but we're very stay focused on and stay very focused on that.

Okay. Great. And then just a quick follow-up from an earlier question. Just seeing if you could provide more color on your visibility maybe around cost for packaging and freight specifically. I guess what have you actually seen in higher costs so far? And then what are you baking in for the back half?

Yes, I'm happy to take that one. So far, we're really not seeing a big impact. Again, in the hedging program and our commodities team, some of these impacts and commodities are managed through that group. And so we've got good visibility really through this year and in some cases, even beyond. And so now having said that, like Kirk said, if it looks like it's going to be prolonged and it's going to be significant, then we'll be looking further out at some of the implications. But right now, from everything we can see, we're in a good spot, feel well covered for 2026.

Our next question comes from the line of David Palmer with Evercore ISI.

I wanted to ask you a couple of questions on the merchandising front and some of the stuff you touched on in your prepared remarks and back at the Investor Day, you talked about the evolution of pack types and shelf sets and I know some of that was planned maybe more into the fall. Like I think you said the stand-up bags versus take-home where maybe something that would get increased distribution into the second half of the year.

But -- you mentioned some stuff earlier on. So maybe you can give a summary of maybe what you're doing now and what's coming? And then as far as promotions, I wonder, are we going to see in scanner data more display year-over-year in the data as you're more all months on, so to speak.

Yes. The right questions. When you get down to the details of how we execute at retail, I think that's really important, David. We start with the number of SKU gains that we are getting across mass, grocery, dollar, and we're building that into kind of the pipeline. We are deploying the stand-up bags versus LifeLab bag.

So that is something that is consumer preferred. It elevates -- we've tested that, that is well received by consumers, and it just drives visibility and is something that makes the category easier to navigate, shop, accessible, all those things that category management drives. So that's the first. So we're looking at how productive the shelf is. We're measuring on-shelf availability just as our customers do, and we go over that every single week. So that intensity around the shelf is really important.

The second area is this perimeter. And what does tentpole activation on top of seasons. And we measure inventory points of interruption on the floor amount of inventory that we have on the floor and location in the store. And I think that helps us drive what's incremental, how this delivers against the plan, how much growth we're getting into this space and what new occasions we're driving, new occasions are like as we come into the celebration of the 250-year celebration of our country for the 4th of July, we are bringing Hershey Kisses our Hershey bars platform, our smores platform and our dots pretzel platform into that.

So we're going after that new occasion being a part of that celebration in a party that's incremental to what we have done in the past. And that's really the element of what tentpoles brings, it is more activation on the perimeter, getting into more occasions and more moments that consumers are celebrating. And the combination of those 2 things is what we give us a lot of confidence for the second half of the year.

I just wanted to get a sense from you. I remember last Halloween, you were talking about how you maybe had some regrets about some bits of execution, maybe pack types you're promoting and some other things. But it's bigger picture, it feels like seasons we such a rich harvest for Hershey. You guys were leaning into it, particularly during the COVID era.

And maybe some of this is just an error that happened where seasons, the going was good, and you got a lot out of it. But I'm wondering how you're thinking about seasons going forward, not just Halloween, but is this going to be something that kind of tracks with confectionery growth overall for you? Or how do you think about seasons going forward?

Yes, we have a great foundation for seasons, but I think that we can be even more disruptive and looking for what consumers are looking for. As we go into Halloween even this year, we feel really good about what we learned and then what new things we can bring to consumers that they are looking for that make that season even more robust.

So we -- that as a leader in seasons, it's on us to be much more thoughtful about where consumers are going, continuing to modernize it, but we're building from a very strong base. But as I look at seasons in the second half, we feel really good. We can see customers, we can see what's landing and you can evaluate, "Hey, are we going to have a really good season? Is this going to be an okay season." We're feeling really good about the back half seasons with what we've been able to partner with our customers with.

Our next question comes from the line of Tom Palmer with JPMorgan.

Sorry to kind of be the third person to ask here, but I did just want to maybe clarify on the expected headline organic sales growth slowdown in the second quarter. I appreciate you've really highlighted it as more shipment timing than anything else. But could we just kind of quantify the specific items that are driving the slowdown. There was 2 points for, I think, ship ahead in the first quarter, there was maybe some Easter timing to consider? Is there anything else? Just could we kind of quantify like underlying maybe what 1Q with you if we strip out some of this timing?

Yes, you've got the biggest pieces. We said slightly down in Q2 due to the timing. Easter sell-through was strong, so the Q2 impact is bigger than anticipated. That end up a little bit in international that we talked about are really the 2 biggest drivers of pulling forward.

Yes. Let's just share a little bit of how I think about it. So the Easter was timing issue, right? So we saw that. We saw sell-through go really well. That pulled a few of our programming into quarter 1. But then if I look at what success looks like that overall consumption trends are staying consistent. So once you get through the overlap in April, you'll see momentum pick up in May, and you'll see momentum pick up in June. So you think about those consistencies, if you remove those onetime events, I think you've got -- you're going to see very consistent performance on consumption, sell-through and execution. So I'm looking at April the impact of Easter, May with some momentum certainly building, getting back on track in June following that.

Okay. And then a question on the spring shelf resets. Maybe frame it relative to past years. Is this more impactful, more changes than we've seen recently?

Yes. We feel good about what we're seeing from an increase versus a year ago versus what we've seen in the last couple of years. So I'm confident that this is a win for us. It's a win for the portfolio that we have, plus some of those we made for making the gondola much more shoppable and inspiring for consumers. So when you package it all together, number of facings, standup, merchandising, and how we were merchandising with category management insights, I feel really good about where we're going this year versus last year, yes.

Our next question comes from the line of Robert Moskow with TD Cowen.

A couple of questions about innovation. I wanted to know what are your expectations for this Hershey premium product you're launching in the second half and Hershey's struggled to introduce viable premium offerings in the past. I think there's questions out there about how far the brand can stretch. So I'm trying to figure out how big of a bet it is? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes. Well, overall innovation, we feel really good about. When we talk about Hershey, this elevated experience. This is a truly elevated. And maybe, Robert, if you were at Investor Day, you had the opportunity to try this. I absolutely love products. So hopefully, you love them. I know I -- all right. Well, I love them. They're they're an important part, right?

I think that when you look at innovation, it is a collection of those things. So we have high expectations for that brand. And we think it's right in the sweet spot of what Hershey can deliver. And that's on deep consumer research and understanding and testing. So we know that we have the opportunity with Hershey to nail it and knock it out of the park with that innovation. But we also look at innovation and totality. So across our portfolio, across our suites portfolio with Jolly Rancher. We also continue to see Reese Oreo be as add on the Hershey innovation, and you see that plus then we have a big Hershey experience with Hershey movie coming out in quarter 4, but it's the collection of those things is how we model and build our business.

It's not reliant on one thing. It is the collection of those things that make the business strong. Having said all that, we have really good expectations for this elevated Hershey experience. And we are launching a product that consumers in the testing have loved.

Got it. Okay. My follow-up was about sweets. Can you tease out sweet performance in first quarter and what your expectations are for this year. The data shows that the Shack product line is down substantially. The sweets portfolio had been growing 20% plus. I just want to get a sense of your confidence that you can capitalize on the strong consumer demand for -- especially among young people for this segment?

Yes. I mean our biggest brand in sweets is Jolly Rancher and Jolly Rancher performed very well within my opening comments. It performed much faster than the category. So that continues. There was some really good innovation on Heat Wave, et cetera.

Now we've launched a new item with the Shack lineup that will give us some momentum later this spring and in the summer. So we feel good about where we are with sweets, Jolly Rancher will continue to be a hero in the space. We've got a strong program around Twizzlers this summer. And we have a robust pipeline in '27 and '28 across sweets, that we'll share. We've shared some of the Suites portfolio and the innovation that's coming. So we're going to continue to invest in this.

When we talk about investing in R&D, there are some specific areas that we're focused on. One is premium, 2 is sweets, 3 is better for you. And you'll see us continue to make that pipeline much more robust in the future. And we've seen that. We're -- that is in our R&D right now, and we've seen that pipeline, so we feel really good about where we're going.

Our next question comes from the line of Max Gumport with BNP Paribas.

I wanted to return to some of the macro headwinds you're watching. So 2 of them included the accelerated health and wellness trends and increasing GLP-1 adoption. Can you just provide an updated view on what you're seeing there and also how you're looking to navigate your portfolio through these headwinds?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I was just going to go back to 1 of the key drivers of the confection category in particular, is that this is an emotional category. It is a treat, not a meal. And I think that's playing out with GLP-1 users and the overall health and wellness trends. Consumers on these drugs, specifically GLP-1, continue to enjoy the category in smaller portions. We know that.

Our research supports the confection category is relatively insulated compared to other food categories. Our framework for estimating the GLP-1 impact includes scenario assumptions for both the near and the long-term horizon for adoption rates. So we have been monitoring calorie reduction, user lap rates and other behavior changes. Now the accelerated adoption rate alongside affordability and new formats are well contemplated in our outlook. So we spend a great deal of time understanding this. It is in our outlook. It is in line with what we've seen and what we expect, but we'll continue to do this.

But this is something that we are continuously monitoring. But overall, again, the category is about a treat. It's still being enjoyed through this. Again, it's about 40 calories per day, 2 to 3 servings per week for the average American on confection. So that's just the scope of what we're seeing. And so that gives us the confidence of where we're going here with this macro. Great.

And then just returning to price elasticities. It sounds like everything you're seeing is quite a bit so far. It's running better than planned. competitors have followed, retailers have accepted the price elasticity response to just consumers are not showing a worse reaction than peers. But can you just provide a bit more color about how this informs your view of your performance from here? And also how it factors into the 2% to 4% organic sales growth target you gave for '27 just a month ago.

Yes, sure. I'd be happy to take that one. So yes, as I said, elasticities are running favorable. They have so far, they continue to -- and it just points to the resilience in these categories, especially in instant consumable,, refreshment and seasons, we've talked in the past how seasons are so precious to consumers. So as we look out, we don't see a material change. It doesn't change as we think about the outlook for the year, we're not changing the guide so we're still inside the earlier guidance, even though the Q1 results look strong.

And it's partly because we still have that price pack architecture hitting shelves as we speak. And we know elasticities can move. So I'll say we're being a little bit cautious there. But we'll continue to monitor it over the coming quarters, we'll be in a better spot to take a look at the guide at the midyear mark. We'll have most of the price pack architecture in place at that point and have a better B. But we're really encouraged by what we're seeing so far and the resilience of the consumer in the category.

Our next question comes from the line of Jim Salera with Stephens Inc.

Kirk, you mentioned tentpoles are poised to add a full point of growth this year. I'm wondering if you can offer some detail around the retail execution, given there's a much higher frequency compared to traditional calendar with really just the seasons and I imagine there's at least some kind of different messaging, whether it's marketing or in store that's going to call attention to kind of the unique test of each of those tentpoles. Please walk through how the sales force is dealing with that and maybe how the marketing team is calling attention to each of those unique occasions?

Yes. I think that is a great question. This really brings the best of demand creation and and demand execution or demand fulfillment. So these moments like the fourth of July is typically where we did not participate, right? This -- between salty and sweet, we have this great opportunity to participate in these big moments of celebrations that are relevant with consumers. So that's kind of the -- that's the motivation, the inspiration behind it. Now what we've done is we've worked with our customers. We put the demand creation together with the marketing -- and then what we do is we bring that to life like we've never done before at the 4th of July, and we've activated that with our sales force.

Our customers are encouraged by this because, look, it just makes these events bigger in-store. It brings more retail theater to the store with our big brands like Hershey and dots. And that makes the overall season better for the retailer. So that is kind of leveraging our strength as a business to bring more relevance to these holidays. And it gives us a chance to capture some of that share, that share of that occasion. This allows us to go from a season into a tentpole into a season into a tentpole, again, and that allows our sales force to be constantly focused on how they develop those big moments in retail. And our customers are very supportive of this. It gives more for the shopper to engage with. But this is -- I would say this is playing to our strength.

Do you have any sense for how much of a gap there is between some of the tentpoles and the traditional season events. I just wonder if there might be a concern of some overlap, if somebody stocked up on Hershey [indiscernible] or LesserEvil popcorn ahead of what would otherwise be kind of a seasonal purchase window?

No. I mean there's enough view that we're measuring incrementality and the breadth of our portfolio allows us to play in these tentpoles and seasons without being redundant or cannibalizing each other. We are the #1 season executor in CMG. We have the largest share of seasons. So when you bring tentpoles to life, we're bringing them to life with different brands, different opportunities, and we're making them as incremental as possible. I would tell you a big collaborator in this is our customers. Our customers own the categories as well. And this is leveraging the best of what we have and the best insights that they have, and that's really what the magic is.

But right now, I feel like there's a really good cadence. So you'll see this summer, you'll see us execute the 250 anniversary. You'll see us execute more and summer travel then you're going to go into Halloween. And there's a nice gap between those to have the sell-down and then the build for Halloween, it really makes sense for retail.

Our next question comes from the line of Alexia Howard with Bernstein.

Can I ask about the Reese's expansion in Europe. I know a while back, you mentioned that in the U.K., the household penetration was in the high teens, I believe, but that was a while ago. Where have you got to now? I believe you may have gone into some other countries in Europe with Reese's. And at what point do you start to think about actually putting plant manufacturing capacity into that region?

Yes, great question. We continue to see Reese's drive in the U.K. and other European countries. Our plan is to continue to develop that. We have a win with Reese's plan that is working. We see innovation off that platform. And that is a real platform in the U.K. We're today leveraging a couple of things. We are leveraging imports, and we're leveraging local manufacturing for some of the products. The plan is to scale Reese's internationally, especially in the U.K. and Europe.

Once we scale, then we'll look to in-source. I think that's the natural progression of of how we build that business and make it much more profitable. I would tell you what we've learned in the playbook that we've learned in the U.K. and Europe is allowing us to take at other places. So I was just recently in Brazil, -- it's starting in Brazil, having the same impact. Brazilians love peanut butter. And so it is -- again, we'll run that playbook and allow us to build that platform also working in Mexico.

Now we manufacture in Mexico, so it's a little closer to home. But those are the playbooks that we are developing in one country or one market that we're able to take into other markets. And Reese's has been very exciting for us in that regard.

Great. And then just to follow up on Rob Moskow's question, innovation, are you able to quantify where you're at in new products as a percent of sales introduced over, say, the last 3 years? And are you at the level that you think you want to be at? Can you sustain the level or do you need to go higher?

Well, I think that's a great question. From it's a high single-digit level of contribution to percent of sales for us. There's always opportunity. And I would tell you that our innovation strategy is one of focus meaning we are innovating in those places that we have the greatest opportunity for us that is premium sweets, better for you. I think I would think about that also in concept of growing our core brands.

Our core continues to grow faster than the category. And so when you have a healthy core business in Reese's and Hershey, your innovation is even more meaningful. So again, innovation will be focused. It will -- I think there's always more for us to do, especially when we get more breakthroughs with sweets and premium and better for you, that will give us even further traction as we develop the portfolio.

Now on the salty snacks side, we continue to innovate as well. Also, really important part of building our portfolio. We just recently launched the snack mix behind the Dots brand, and that's done exceptionally well. So again, that same model of healthy core and then innovation that's more disruptive in nature in salty, where we're taking the snack mix category and disrupting it with Dots and seeing a lot of traction with consumers there.

I would tell you, this company is very focused on raising the bar on innovation, and we have a lot of momentum in front of us.

All I would add there is 1 of the reasons you talked about incremental R&D investment coming to help build that capability and build that muscle for the future.

Our next question comes from the line of Scott Marks with Jefferies.

First thing I wanted to ask about in the prerecorded remarks, you noted that the Hershey and Reese's brand nonseasonal grew pretty materially. I think you called out 11% and 10% growth there. Could you help us understand the drivers behind that? I know you called out March Madness as tentpole, but is there anything else kind of helping support that strong performance?

Yes. There's a couple of things. On our Hershey campaign, if you remember, during the Olympics was very well received, and that gave a lot of lift to the Hershey brand. That, I think, is really important. On Reese's, Reese's was the center of our big tent pole event for March Madness. So that allowed us to build inventory and get traction on the brand. But when we look at programming behind creating demand for Hershey -- brand Hershey's and Reese's, this is an example of how it comes to life and works, and it works on the core. So this is -- Q1 is just an example of how that can come to life.

Okay. Clear on that. And then second question from me in terms of how you're thinking about the cocoa market and outlook 1 of your chocolate competitors earlier this week said that they believe current prices fairly reflect where supply and demand are globally. Just curious if you can give us an update on your thoughts around the cocoa market and how you're thinking about the go forward from here.

Sure. Yes, we still remain in the view that long term, Coca could remain above some of those really lower historical levels that we've seen. Now we'll see how it plays out. So I'd say long term, we probably have a somewhat cautious view. In the near term, we continue to anticipate a larger surplus in '25 and '26, partly the diversification of the supply chain, strong crops, declining demand, continued expansion in new origins and so forth.

So if that happens, if we would see Coco fall, as we talked about at the investor conference, we have ability to participate, particularly in '27 and beyond in that downside. And so those would be things that could trigger upside opportunity to our '27 and '28 outlook.

But we're watching the space closely and I believe making sure that we're managing the business for the long term in terms of hedging, but also in structures that allow agility to participate in downside.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Lavery with Piper Sandler.

Just picking up on '27 there. I know it was only a month ago, you gave a preliminary outlook there. But any thoughts on? And maybe in particular, could you help contextualize how to think about some of the risks from higher oil-related costs, maybe how much are of COGS that impacts or just how to think about what to watch there.

I'm happy to kind of take that. I think -- and we talked a little bit about the conference in general about things that could go up upside or downside for '27. We kind of broke them into controllables and non-deal. I think that basket is still largely the same. The things that we can control around innovation and media, ROIs, tentpoles as we just talked about, elasticity to some degree, and of course, continuing to deliver on productivity and cost savings.

I think all of those things, we continue to have high confidence in our ability to manage and execute. We do have some factors outside of our control. We just touched on cocoa being one that could be -- could potentially be an upside. We'll see where the market goes. And then the macro headwinds and, of course, competition. So far -- and I'll come to oil.

As Kirk said earlier, from a macro standpoint, there's nothing we're seeing that's sort of outside the bounds of what we would have talked about back at the conference. We didn't expect those areas to get better in '27, and that's factored into the outlook.

With respect to oil, in particular, it's pretty small exposure for us. The bigger impact would be indirect through packaging and so forth. And those impacts take time. So it does go back a little to what Kirk said how high and how long would the oil price impact last stage sitting here, we wouldn't change anything as we look to '27 and beyond.

Okay. That's helpful. And just a follow-up back on the '26 outlook. You had pointed to elasticities remaining favorable as a potential driver of upside to guidance. And it sounds like that's so far sticking and staying true I guess what's some of your thinking on holding it then? Is it just that it's a little bit early still? I know you mentioned some price pack architecture, can you just still coming? Or are those maybe more significant than we might appreciate? Or how do you help us think about some of that?

Yes. I think it's just being cautious. As I said, we're really pleased with the start to the year. I feel really confident about the balance of the year, items that we can control, elasticities as they can move around, but we like what we see and our projection is still strong, like we just talked about oil prices kind of a new macro to keep an eye on it. And in general, there's still a lot of movement and evolution in those macros. So I think it's just a prudent approach.

By the time we get to the midyear, Mark, we'll have a lot more visibility on all of this and be able to take potentially a different position.

Our next question comes from Steve Powers with Deutsche Bank.

Just first, a quick follow-up. Kirk, I think you mentioned earlier just in talking about the snacks growth rate that your choice is to you prioritize some of the noncore nonbranded parts of the portfolio was a bit of a notable drag on the top line relative to consumption. I guess just want to frame how big that noncore part of the portfolio is today and whether that is something that we should keep in mind as a drag that will continue or if it was more just isolated this quarter?

Yes. There will continue to be a drag, and then we'll continue to communicate kind of where the brand performance is versus the private label. I mean, this is something that as planned, and it's something we're working with our customers on. So we feel really good about that. I think our focus is on driving meaningful volume and growth with our branded products, and we like where we're going. We are driving a significant amount of the growth in the category.

So if you look at Salty, the drivers of growth are definitely Dots, Skinny Pop, LesserEvil. They're driving exceptional growth. And we see that continuing. Now, part of the private label, yes, that will be a drag. But overall, we'll be in a really good place, full year on both top line and bottom line for our salty portfolio.

Okay. Perfect. And then I just wanted to ask on functional snacking. I don't think we've talked about it yet on this call. It was one of the higher growth platforms. I think you you highlighted and we discussed at the Investor Day, just a little perspective on how that part of the business is situated as we go into the balance of the year. And I guess maybe from your perspective, if perhaps that is a higher priority for incremental investment attention, then maybe on the outside, it's perceived.

Yes, absolutely. And that's a big growth. I mean the business is relatively small compared to the rest of our business. That is an area that we are investing in. This is a space that consumers are -- they're in. And we're seeing a high level of growth reflected in our earlier comments -- that will be -- that will continue to be a part.

Now our job is to build this business to be a much larger, more influential part of our business. And we're doing just that. We're investing in R&D. We're updating our formulas. You'll see really good brand work across one and fulfill -- we've also entered into a JV with VivaKi, which is -- has breakthrough protein delivery that we really like to see and that R&D will be meaningfully different. And we know that we have to be differentiated in this space, and we feel really good about where we're going with the protein and functional business -- and right now, we're seeing high mid-single digit -- or double-digit growth on our business today, and we know we can build that for the future.

So more to come from us on this area. It's small, mighty part of our growth, and you'll see the investment in innovation, and we'll have a lot more to talk about for some of these breakthroughs that we're working on. SP1.

Our next question comes from the line of Rob Dickerson with Jefferies.

Great. Thank you. I'm a BTIG now. But I appreciate the shout out. Yes, Steve, I just wanted to come back to the margin but more specific to confection. I mean, obviously, there's been a lot of volatility over the past few years for pretty well understood reasons, clearly did better in Q1 versus last year's Q1, but then there's some shift in Easter and there's reinvestment, their optimizations coming.

And so I'm just kind of curious, I guess, it's more specific to cadence, but also for the rest of the year, but also just kind of relative to history, right? If we kind of exclude the past few years, your confection margin was somewhat stable, let's say, quarter-to-quarter. Clearly, some seasonality differences, but somewhat stable. So I'm just curious, like as we think through kind of this year, right, with Cocoa coming down? And then also, I guess, into next year. Is there kind of a perspective that, yes, like I think the next few quarters, there should be more stability?

Or should we see it like they're going to come down a little bit in Q2 and then really ramp as we get through the back half of the year? And I have a quick follow-up.

Sure. Yes, we are going to see some movements still [indiscernible]. Our challenge always is season, season timing, I feel like forever, we'll be talking about seasonal timing quarter-to-quarter variability related to that. But as we look through the balance sheet, there's nothing big change you have we have more tentpoles to plan for more activation to plan for. But we're going to -- particularly as we get to the back half of the year and we start lapping some of the higher priced cocoa and commodities. We're going to see that step up. And so we're not -- we're going to see that play out over the course of the year. I would say there's nothing unusual to really point out in that sequence.

Okay. So if we think about kind of where the gross margin cadence kind of planned for the year. It would seem like kind of plus or minus, let's say, kind of the op margin and confection would kind of follow. Is that fair?

Can you say that again, I'm not sure I totally understood your question.

Gross margin, right? You spoke earlier [indiscernible] as implied in Q2 and then the back half, I'm just curious, like is the cadence kind of the trajectory on North American confectionery margin -- operating margin should kind of basically track with gross margin.

The difference is where they will disconnect is the investing in media, which will pick up certainly in Q2 and and even in the back half. So that's the disconnect team, say, gross margin and operating margins as expected. So that's all part of the plan for this year. So that's where the 2 will have some deviation.

All right. Great. And then just a quick follow-up, which you just touched on. SM&A came in a little bit light in Q1, I think relative to expectations, but it sounds like expectations for the year haven't changed. And then just given timing of shelf resets, what have you, you've spoken to? It sounds like that SM&A will then be kind of ramping as we get through the year? Is that right?

Yes. You got it. Yes. The expectation for the full year is unchanged, still expect to see double-digit increase in marketing and advertising. We did have some movement between Q1 and Q2. Some of that was delayed nonworking media development, which slipped into Q2. And then we've also tuned a little bit more towards spring activations in the working media. So -- but overall, for the full year, no change in expectation.

Our final question this morning comes from the line of John Baumgartner with Mizuho Securities.

Kirk, I just wanted to come back to premium chocolate. At Investor Day, there was reference to Brookside, and that seems to be differentiated when it was acquired, but you ended up stalling out on competition. And then in premium trade up, the Hershey's blessed, that was a play on texture, but that faded after a few years. So I'm curious, when you speak to breakthrough now, is the plan here to essentially sort of outpace and out texture or competitors in the mass market and reset expectations for the mass market? Or is the target more so new consumers and channels that maybe have not been a traditional focus for Hershey? How do we think about that balance there?

Yes. I think those are really relevant. I think about premium, I think about accessible premium, consumers are looking for new experience. that's not changed. We have three brands that we love for this. One is Brookside, as you mentioned, we'll innovate on Brookside. We're seeing growth in Brookside. We also are investing in Cadbury. Cadbury has a lot of potential in this market. It is a premium experience and it's accessible as well. And we'll innovate on Cadbury as part of that. So you've got between Brookside and Cadbury, there's really good momentum.

And then like we talked about, we're building some accessible premium on our Hershey's brand and we'll have new brands that we talk about later in this year for next year that create this great experience for consumers. So indulgent premium really targeted towards Gen Z consumers. So we feel really good about where we're going with our premium business and being a part of that. But I think there's -- it's it's a small part of the business today.

So when you think about pure premium, it's about 5% of the total category. Now there's a lot of growth because there's a lot of experience inside premium, and that's drawing consumers to that. So we are definitely going to be in that space and leading in that space through some of our key brands that we have.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Ms. Naughton for any final comments.

We look forward to catching up with many of you over the coming days and weeks.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Good morning, and welcome to the prerecorded discussion of Hershey Company's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Results. I'm Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Hershey's President and CEO, Kirk Tanner; and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil. In addition to these remarks, we will host an analyst Q&A-only session at 08:30 a.m. Eastern on the morning of April 30th. A replay of this webcast and our subsequent Q&A session will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website, along with their corresponding transcripts.

During the course of today's discussion, management will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release on the company's SEC filings. Finally, please note that during today's discussion, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe will provide useful information for investors.

The presentation of this information is not intended to be in consideration in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations to the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release, which is available on the Investor Relations page of our website. For certain forward-looking non-GAAP measures, we are unable to reconcile to the most directly comparable GAAP measure without unreasonable efforts, including an ability to reasonably [ ascertain ] earnings per share. It is now my pleasure to introduce our President and CEO, Kirk Tanner.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We kicked off the year strong and are on track to hit our financial targets for 2026. We are laser focused on fueling core growth and making bold moves in brand investment, innovation, R&D, technology and talent to drive our business to new heights. Four weeks ago, at Investor Day, we laid out exactly where Hershey is going and how we will get there. Q1 reflects solid progress against that plan. Our core performed well, our newer bets showed real traction, and our teams delivered at retail as One Hershey. We feel good about where we're headed and our full year outlook is unchanged.

Let me walk you through the details. Net sales in the first quarter increased 10.6%. Organic constant currency net sales increased 7.9%, reflecting the resilience and relevance of our categories and brands, our investments in media, and innovation and execution of cultural and seasonal [ tentpoles ]. Within our North America confectionery segment, price elasticities were comparable to what we saw in the fourth quarter of 2025 and favorable versus planned levels. This was offset by unfavorable winter weather and consumer macro pressure, which we are monitoring closely. SNAP program changes had a mild impact on our categories given the limited states where waivers have taken effect.

As we discussed at Investor Day, a strong core is our top strategic priority. We see continued consumer demand for confection even as shoppers make more deliberate choices about their spending, investments in media, merchandising and innovation across our iconic brands are driving growth. Hershey's and Reese's delivered first quarter nonseasonal retail sales lift of 11% and 10%, respectively. [ Jolly Rancher ] takeaway increased nearly 5%, outpacing the sweets category. We've also seen strong demand for gum and mints as the category benefits from functional snacking tailwinds, including GLP-1 adoption.

Retail sales for our third largest confection brand, ice breakers, increased over 8% in the quarter. While consumers are facing budgetary pressures, candy and snacks remain an affordable way to bring joy to cultural celebration with loved ones. Valentine's Day category sales increased approximately 3.5% with Hershey gaining nearly 25 basis points of seasonal share. Easter consumer participation was in line with last year and sell-through exceeded our expectations. [ March badness ] tentpole merchandising delivered a 10% to 15% increase in display activity and a double-digit increase in net sales. Functional snacking is one of the high-growth platforms we discussed at Investor Day, and we are off to a solid start in 2026. Protein Bar portfolio consumption increased 17% in the first quarter ahead of the category, driven by targeted marketing and momentum in the club channel.

Our North America salty snacks segment continued to demonstrate strong momentum in the first quarter. Retail sales, excluding LesserEvil, grew by nearly 10%, resulting in a nearly 25 basis point share gain. [indiscernible] Pretzels achieved a 13% year-over-year increase in retail sales. Reese's [indiscernible] Pretzels added 130 basis points to pretzel category share. [indiscernible] snack mix made a strong debut capturing over 200 basis points of snack mix market share in the quarter, indicating encouraging early consumer reception. LesserEvil retail sales grew more than 65% fueled by high trial and repeat rates and expanded distribution. We are encouraged by this early performance and focus on building on it through continued distribution expansion, adjacent category entry and brand building investment.

In the International segment, Brazil and the U.K. showed category strength, while Mexico continued to face economic and regulatory headwinds. Our anchor markets delivered mid-single-digit organic net sales growth, excluding shipment timing. We maintained or grew market share across key regions, thanks to favorable pricing elasticity seasonal and innovation performance and distribution gains. Looking forward, we remain confident in our full year targets for organic net sales growth of 2.5% to 3.5% and adjusted EPS growth of 30% to 35%. We are closely tracking SNAP program changes, health and wellness trends, choiceful consumer spending and broader macro pressures, including gas prices and insulation. We believe our current outlook appropriately reflects what we know today.

Let me speak to how we plan to deliver in the balance of the year. Following spring resets, we expect velocity improvement from increased shelf spacings, optimize shelf placement, new price pack architecture and key innovations, including Reese's Oreo in the take-home aisle. In [indiscernible] snacking, we project meaningful distribution growth for core items and continued [indiscernible] snack mix expansion, updated Pirate's Booty media and packaging accelerates in Q2 with consumption improvement expected in the back half. This summer, we are activating [indiscernible] and summer suites at retail, continuing Reese's nostalgic flavor mashups and launching social influencer campaigns around Pokemon's 30th anniversary and Christian [indiscernible] ahead of the men's soccer surge.

Looking to the second half, 3 demand accelerators give us confidence in maintaining top line momentum as we begin to annualize 2025 pricing actions. First, seasonal consumer participation in Halloween and holiday should remain resilient as people continue to prioritize meaningful cultural occasions. We are expanding assortments, bringing salty into seasonal displays, introducing new value-priced and gifting options and increasing seasonal brand investments to drive further share growth.

Second, cultural. We have even more moments to activate, starting with summer. We are celebrating America's 250th anniversary, back-to-school and fall football, executing across the full portfolio as One Hershey. This includes special packaging, increased retail presence and category merchandising. And this Thanksgiving, the Hershey movie is a once-in-a-generation moment for our brand, that will activate across stores, online and beyond. To give some perspective, Americana and the Hershey movie are expected to contribute almost 1 percentage point to company sales in 2026.

Third, innovation and brands. Our innovation pipeline includes an elevated Hershey bar, new protein and 0 sugar offerings, a multi-textured Reese's pieces item and new forms and flavors across suites, refreshment and salty. Reese's ran new creative during March Madness, earning over 1.5 billion impressions ahead of a full campaign launch in the second half. Pirate's Booty and Jolly Ranchers new campaign will build through the year.

Taken together, these demand accelerators, seasonal, cultural, innovation and brand investment reflect the strategy we laid out in March. Q1 gives us a solid foundation to build from and we continue to see upside from strong marketplace execution. I'll turn it over to Steve for more details on our financial results and outlook.

Thank you, Kirk, and good morning, everyone. Our strong first quarter performance across net sales and profit reflects the resilience of our categories, the relevance of our brands, disciplined investments and executional excellence. Reported net sales grew 10.6% versus the same period last year. The LesserEvil acquisition was a 2-point benefit and foreign currency translation was a 70 basis point tailwind. Net price realization was approximately 10% reflecting our strategic pricing actions in the North America confectionery and international segments. Volume declined approximately 2 points better than expected reflecting continued resilient consumer demand and earlier than planned shipment timing in the North America confectionery and international segments. Earlier shipments from Q2 contributed around 2 points to sales growth in the first quarter. North America confectionery segment net sales increased 8.3%.

Net price realization was approximately 12%, slightly below our expectations, reflecting seasonal mix. Volume declined approximately 4% as price elasticity, reduced Easter shipments due to the shorter season, and one fewer shipping days were partially offset by earlier shipments of our summer activations planned for Q2. Net sales for our North America salty snacks segment increased 26%. The LesserEvil acquisition was a 20 percentage point benefit. Organic constant currency volume growth of approximately 5% reflects performance across [indiscernible] Reese's filled pretzel and Skinny Pop, partially offset by the planned reduction in private label production and a voluntary temporary product withdrawal during the quarter.

Net price realization was neutral in the quarter in line with our expectations. International segment net sales increased 16.1% in the first quarter. Foreign currency translation was an approximate 7-point tailwind. Net price realization was around 12%, reflecting previously announced pricing action across key markets. Volume declined approximately 2% reflecting elasticity impact, partially offset by stronger-than-planned performance in Brazil and the earlier shipment timing. Inventory stocking in the Middle East and Asia Pacific, driven by actions to mitigate near-term global shipping disruptions contributed approximately 5 points of volume growth in the first quarter and is expected to reverse in Q2.

We remain confident in our full year net sales outlook of 4% to 5% growth and organic net sales growth of 2.5% to 3.5%. The Q1 timing benefits from earlier shipments and Easter timing are expected to reverse in the second quarter. For the first half, we anticipate organic net sales growth in the range of 3% to 4%.

Moving down the P&L. Adjusted gross margin decreased 80 basis points in the first quarter as expected commodity inflation and tariff costs more than offset positive net price realization, productivity and transformation program savings. As we have previously discussed, we expect a meaningful recovery in gross margin to begin in the second quarter. This improvement reflects continued net price realization and productivity benefits as elevated commodity costs from the prior year period are lapped.

Our full year gross margin outlook remains an improvement of approximately 400 basis points. Advertising and related consumer marketing investments increased approximately 6% in the first quarter, temporarily lower than planned due to timing in North America confectionery media production investments and better alignment with spring activations.

We continue to expect advertising and related consumer marketing spend to increase double digits versus the prior year across our segments. Operating expenses, including divisional and corporate expenses increased to 2.2%, reflecting capability and technology investments. Increased investments were partially offset by lower compensation and benefits costs, lower consulting fees and transformation program savings.

As discussed at Investor Day, we expect to continue to drive productivity and make the right investments to support the long-term health of the company, all while strengthening our brands and building capabilities across the organization. We remain on track to deliver $100 million in savings this year, the final year of our AAA initiative. These savings are expected to be realized mainly across cost of goods sold.

This quarter, we delivered $26 million, and we expect these benefits to continue building throughout the course of the year. The adjusted tax rate for the quarter was 25%, an increase of 60 basis points versus the year ago period, driven by foreign rate differentials and increased state taxes. Looking to the full year, we continue to expect a full year tax rate of approximately 25% to 27%, while other expenses are expected to be approximately $15 million to $20 million. Interest expense was $50 million in the first quarter, and the full year outlook remains in a range of $200 million to $210 million.

Adjusted earnings per share increased 12.4% in the quarter. We expect second quarter adjusted earnings per share to increase at least 15% as pricing net of commodity costs improves while business reinvestment increases year-over-year. There is no change to our full year adjusted EPS outlook of up 30% to 35%. In the first quarter, capital expenditures, including software were $115 million, $31 million lower than the prior year period. Our full year capital expense outlook remains in the range of $425 million to $475 million. Supported by a strong balance sheet and confidence in the underlying business, we increased our dividend by 6% earlier this year.

During the first quarter, we paid $288 million in dividends to shareholders. The company repurchased $69 million of common shares in the first quarter as we offset dilution from equity compensation grants in 2025 and '26. We are operating in a dynamic environment, and we continue to believe our full year outlook incorporates prudent assumptions on macro headwinds, including the implementation of SNAP waivers, accelerated health and wellness trends and increasing GLP-1 adoption as well as ongoing financial strain on consumers amid elevated geopolitical uncertainty related to the Middle East.

I am encouraged by the resilience we are seeing across our brands and portfolio, solid consumer engagement in key cultural moments and the incrementality from our new growth factors. Our biggest brands are growing faster than our categories. As Kirk laid out, we have exciting plans for the second half to maintain momentum. We have solid visibility into cost deflation in 2027, which should enable us to deliver margin recovery while accelerating investment to build our next billion-dollar brands and enhance next-gen capabilities.

I remain confident that our disciplined approach to investing in our brands, capabilities and people will enable us to create value for our stakeholders for many years to come. With that, I will turn it back to Kirk for closing remarks.

Thanks, Steve. We are navigating a dynamic environment with a strategy we believe is right for the long term. Q1 shows the plan is working. The team is executing, and we remain focused on delivering on our financial goals and driving sustainable growth.

Thank you for your time this morning. I invite you to join our live Q&A webcast beginning at 08:30 a.m. Eastern available at thehersheycompany.com. Thank you very much.

Please welcome to the stage Anoori Naughton, VP, Investor Relations.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Hershey's 2026 Investor Day. I'm Anoori Naughton, Head of Investor Relations, and I want to thank all of you for joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange and to those of you who are joining from webcast.

Before we begin, please note that during today's presentation, we may reference certain forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. We believe these measures provide useful supplemental information for investors, but they should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the appendix of today's presentation, which can be found on our Investor Relations website.

So we're very excited to be here today to share our strategy to lead NextGeneration snacking. As the agenda shows, you will hear from Kirk Tanner, Chief Executive Officer; Stacy Taffet, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer; Andrew Archambault, U.S. President; Jason Reiman, Chief Supply Chain Officer; and Steve Voskuil, Chief Financial Officer.

The team will walk you through our strategy with a discussion around the strength of our core snacking portfolio and growth opportunity, the evolution of our retail execution through One Hershey. We will then pause for a brief break and then return with our tech-enabled supply chain capabilities and finally, how all of this comes together in our growth algorithm, capital priorities and our approach to value creation.

We will conclude this afternoon with a Q&A session. For those in the room, we invite you to join us for 3 immersive breakout sessions afterwards, followed with by a cocktail reception with our executive team. Now before I turn it over to Kirk, let's enjoy some of our exciting media and social activations.

[Presentation]

Please welcome to the stage, Kirk Tanner, President and CEO.

Good afternoon. Yes, this is where you go. All right, let's get this started. Thank you for being here. The New York Stock Exchange, how fun is this? Did you walk into the lobby and smell chocolate? Okay. I would like to also thank those that are joining us online. You did not smell chocolate, okay? But today, you're going to have the opportunity to really hear about our story, our strategy, and I have a beautiful team of leaders that are going to help execute that, plus you get to shop, okay? We have shopping bags. You can shop. Get ready for Easter or whatever, pick out your favorites.

So I want to talk a little bit about what I've noticed over my career of successful leaders and successful companies that are in the consumer space. I'd like to characterize them as the 3 Cs. The first C is consumer, consumer obsession. Companies that are obsessed with the consumers and exceeding consumers' expectation are the ones that win.

The second C is customers, building partnerships of trust with retail partners and having that mutual sustainable, profitable growth is key. And the third C is colleagues, investing in our people, their careers, their capabilities, their performance. And I can tell you, after my first 7 months at Hershey, these 3 Cs are alive and thriving. We have a rare purpose-driven growth company focused on delivering top-tier performance for all of our stakeholders. And I am truly energized by what's ahead and what we're going to share with you today. So let's talk about that.

So joining me today, I have Stacy, Andrew, Jason and Steve, Together, we're going to share our long-term strategy called leading the NextGeneration of snacking. We have a strong foundation with significant headway for growth. And Stacy will talk about how we're building the NextGeneration portfolio of the future with brands, consumers, love. Andrew is going to talk about this thing, we've been calling One Hershey, a commercial approach to bringing our brands together and executing with excellence across retail. Jason will illustrate our supply chain, our investments in supply chain, how we're modernizing it to deliver a speed, a supply chain with agility and efficiency. And then there's no better person to bring it all together than Steve. He will bring how we're going to perform from a financial perspective and metrics over the short and long term.

So let's get started. We are emerging stronger than ever after unprecedented cocoa inflation pressure. And why are we doing that? Because we invested during this time. We invested to drive growth for the future. And where did we invest? We reinvigorated our core brands with core innovation like Reese's OREO. We started to build this fantastic snack portfolio in permissible snacking. We also invested in IT talent and technology talent and infrastructure so that we could move faster with speed.

We changed our -- and we transformed our cost structure. I think this is really important. As we think about that productivity pipeline that we can invest back into our business. So these 4 key investments allow us to move faster and further coming out of unprecedented inflation. I think that's really important. So let's talk about our portfolio a little bit. I love the structure of this portfolio. It is differentiated and where we play is very intentional. So let's start with U.S. confection. We are the leader in this space. This is a resilient growing category that's driven by core growth and innovation.

When you look at permissible snacking and nutrition and functional, these are terrific growth areas for the Hershey Company, gives us high growth, and it gives us the opportunity to expand into more. Internationally, we have markets where we have built our brands in our core markets, where we're seeing high single-digit growth and gaining share. When you look across this portfolio, it is a portfolio built for growth. When we think about internationally, I think it's important that you look at where the growth is, our track record of success, so I look at Canada, Mexico and Brazil. We've built portfolios of strength, and our go-to-market is excellent, and we're gaining share. that's important. But our focus is going to be on delivering growth in those markets and focusing on markets that have scale, categories and profit potential. Markets like Europe and the U.K., where we have a right to win. And the work is already underway.

Our brand Reese's, now Reese's is one of our core brands in the U.S. Internationally, Reese's is an insurgent brand. It's something consumers haven't experienced yet. And it's breaking in. We've built a business over $300 million internationally with brand Reese's in recent years. So work is underway. We are positioned to lead the NextGeneration of snacking. Now when you look at the snacking landscape, the opportunity is large, and the bar to win is high. Companies that move faster, stay closer to the consumer and execute the best in execution. Those are going to be those companies that win. And Hershey is built for that. And the actions that we have taken and those investments we've made, put us in a strong position to lead.

So we're going to talk about this a lot today. I'm sure you're going to ask a lot of questions about this macro environment. It is dynamic and changing and evolving, right? Consumers are continuing to lean into health and wellness, GLP-1 adoption continues and is accelerating. The conversation around this food policy is continuing to evolve and change. So we can look at that left side. We're looking at that left side and saying, "Well, how do we win? How do you play offense?" At Hershey, we are leaning into the opportunities that matter most right now, premiumization, functional, better-for-you and a stronger omnichannel execution, be great digitally. We are focused on where the consumers are moving and changing, especially this Gen Z consumer and generation.

So let's talk about where the growth is going to come from and how we see our business today. So that strong foundation on the left, I want you to think about it as building on a foundation of growth. So moving from a mainstream chocolate powerhouse, it's our superpower, it's our strength to a total confection leadership position, leaning into premium, better-for-you and sweets. So from chocolate to total confection leadership.

So today, we have a fast-growing Salty business. I love our brands in Salty. And there's so much more we can do. We are in a few high-growth subcategories. We have the opportunity to expand into more permissible snacking categories to drive that growth. And that's our expectation. In front of you, in fact, you have a Dot's Snack Mix. That's us taking Dot's into Snack Mix away from just Pretzels. So that's an example of what we're doing.

Today, we selectively play in protein. And this is a growth vector for us in the future. We're investing in R&D and capabilities to make this even stronger. This will be -- continue to be a trend. Functional delivery is important to consumers.

Today, we have a sales force that is primarily focused on delivering our confection portfolio in retail. We've just announced One Hershey. One Hershey brings our total portfolio together so that we can reach more customers with our brands and build a beautiful sweet and salty portfolio together. We have built strong capabilities in digital and built this foundation. And in the future, we're leveraging AI to solve our biggest opportunities. I think that's really important. And we'll talk a lot about that today on those use cases.

So our strategy is on three pillars: NextGeneration portfolio, how we see the retail of the future and a modern supply chain. So with our portfolio, it is about building our core portfolio and driving growth. Our brands Reese's and Hershey are growing faster than the rest of our business right now. They are doing exceptionally well.

Now that won't be enough. So we need to lean into those faster-growing categories like premium and sweets. In retail, our focus is on commercial excellence, out executing our competition at the moment of choice or the moment of truth or whatever moment you want to call it, truth or choice, we're going to be there with excellence. In supply chain, it's all about outproduce with efficiency, agility and productivity and keep that flywheel turning. And that's what we're doing with our supply chain. The output of this is sustained, differentiated financial performance.

All right. So let's talk about the portfolio in two halves. Maximizing the core is critical. Modernizing our brand building, Stacy is going to talk a lot about that. Increasing portfolio effectiveness and sharpening our portfolio for where it should play with consumers and building our next billion-dollar brands. On the right side, it is about what's next. It is about increasing our innovation into those spaces and making the right investments across technology and R&D so that we can sprint into those places. And it is building new brands that are complementary to the portfolio and selectively looking at targeted M&A that also drive incremental growth for our portfolio and are a complement to our total portfolio.

So we're talking about leaning into the growth. Where is the growth? One, our core is growing, but there are growth spaces that are moving faster functional, better-for-you, sweets, permissible salty, premium. And internationally, we have incremental opportunities to grow profitable growth in focused markets. So this is the structure of it today. 33% of our growth is coming from those areas on the right. In the future, that's going to be 40%. So we're going to lean more into the growth while growing our core.

Now we'll talk more about this today, and Stacy will break this down into exactly how we do this. When you look at this display, this to me is like movie night solution. This is One Hershey bringing our salty and sweet together. One Hershey is a real unlock for growth. It combines our total snacking portfolio into one impactful approach to commercial excellence. In addition to investing in this retail capability, we're investing in away from home, omnichannel, digital and other emerging channels.

One Hershey is one voice to our customer. It makes us easier to do business with. It allows us to bring our very best, our resources and merchandising in the store with our sales team, and it elevates our role as advisers to our retailers. Now this is a holistic approach to selling our portfolio and sweet and salty together is definitely a one-two punch.

Supply chain, when I think of an elite supply chain, I think of Jason Reiman right there. 30 years with the company. Just celebrate, let's give Jason, 30 years with Hershey. Who says we don't do recognition at the Hershey Company, 30 years. You're going to hear from him today, but Jason has built an amazing supply chain, and we continue to modernize it. And we think about things like precision demand fulfillment as a competitive advantage.

In supply chain, we're investing in technology and automation that enable better service levels, precision, faster speed to market. And of course, this is that productivity machine that allows us to be more efficient. Now a world-class supply chain protects what consumers want most. They want the highest level of quality, great taste, affordability and more access to a broad portfolio. And that's what supply chain does. It is an enabler of our strategy.

Technology is critically important. We have spent a lot of time and resource against building talent, building an infrastructure so that we can leverage technology and AI to solve our biggest opportunities. And we're going to talk about these individually today across our portfolio; speed to market and ideation and R&D; commercial, how we leverage tools in the field to drive efficiency; with supply chain, real-time decision-making that make the entire supply chain more efficient and automatic, all coming together. This is enabled by our overall investment in our digital foundation and talent.

Now let's talk about this team. We have a world-class team. I have the privilege to working side by side with elite top-tier talent that are focused on the consumer and the customer. And we divided our organization into a model of demand creation, commercial excellence and demand fulfillment because that's how we see the world.

We see it's our responsibility to create demand for our brands that consumers love, execute with excellence with commercial excellence with our retail partners and then fulfill with speed and precision. And that's how we're structured and organized. So let's talk about our strategy and where the focus is. I want to take a little time on this slide.

So first, the first pillar that unlocks this differentiated result is to expand our leadership in our confection business in North America. That is from moving from margin recovery in '26 and '27 to margin expansion. It is expanding our leadership in confection in North America. First objective. Second objective is leverage our fastest-growing portfolio in Salty, landed in permissible Salty Snacks to build to a #2 share position in the category. That is critically important, and we're on the way to doing that.

Third is to drive an incremental growth and profitability internationally in our key markets, while focusing on new markets that have high growth and profit potential.

And finally, driving upside growth with our focus on a differentiated functional portfolio by building capabilities in this functional snacking world. So that is our four areas of focus in our strategy. What does that deliver? So on the left, you see this period of '26 and '27, restoring profitability, delivering organic, net revenue at 2% to 4% and having double-digit EPS growth.

In '28, it's more a balanced revenue growth algorithm focused on unit growth, occasion growth, volume growth, all in balance with revenue, delivering organic revenue at 2% to 4% and EPS 6% to 8%, all while delivering top-tier shareholder returns. There's a few things I want you to take away today. We have a unique snacking portfolio that is focused on growing our core business while expanding into significant white spaces. Now this is all driven by extending our confection leadership in North America, reaching that #2 position in Salty, focus on permissible snacking, unlocking growth with our One Hershey commercial model and furthering our tech-enabled supply chain to drive greater productivity and efficiency. We expect to deliver earnings recovery by 2027 and set the business up for long-term growth.

So today, you'll hear from Stacy, Andrew and Jason on how we out-market, out-execute and outdeliver to achieve our goals. Then you're going to hear from Steve on how this all comes together in our long-term algorithm. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Stacy to talk about our unique portfolio. Thank you very much.

Thank you. good afternoon. I am thrilled to be with you to talk about our amazing portfolio. Look at it, isn't it beautiful? And how it's positioned for growth now and in the future. Over the next 25 minutes, I'll talk you through the opportunities in front of us, and how we'll capitalize on that opportunity by maximizing our current portfolio and innovating into new spaces. Snacking has been a remarkably consistent growth category, delivering 3% or higher annually pre-COVID with broad participation across categories. That trajectory didn't break under pressure. Even amid meaningful headwinds, the category has held at 2% to 3%, anchored by the rise of better-for-you and functional segments and the proven durability of emotional categories like chocolate. As we look ahead, we expect snacking to reaccelerate through economic stabilization, Gen Z purchasing power and the scaling of new on-trend categories. Hershey snacking portfolio across sweet, salty and protein categories allows us to participate in nearly 1/4 of total U.S. snacking today.

Our categories are attractive and growing ahead of total snacking driven by their functional and emotional consumer value. And we have significant headroom to meet even more snacking occasions. We've demonstrated we can scale outside of core chocolate by deeply understanding consumer needs in different snacking occasions. Through this model, we took both SkinnyPop and Dot's to #1 positions in their respective categories. And we have substantial upside in International that we'll realize by focusing on three anchor markets where the category is attractive, our portfolio is relevant, and we have the right to win. The markets are Mexico, Europe and the U.K. and Brazil, where we see robust per capita consumption, strong growth and premiumization potential. In these markets, we'll drive share by building our global iconic brands through localized marketing, targeted innovation and supported by an optimized route-to-market execution. And then across the rest of the world, we'll see growth through asset-light execution that lets local demand lead.

So we have lots of opportunity for growth. Step one is to maximize the impact of our current portfolio. There's three ways we plan to do that. First, modernize the way we build our brands; second, better leverage our portfolio for incremental impact. And third, we'll invest in scaling our next set of billion-dollar brands. So let me set a little context before I talk about brand building. It's really important we understand the consumer and the culture they're living in.

Let's face it. Consumers are living in a chaotic world, full of sensory overload and complexity. And that pace of life has led to high levels of stress and even loneliness. Younger generations are spending hours and hours on social media, and it's only making them more isolated than ever. As a result, they're seeking meaningful human interactions. And little joyful moments to lift the every day. That's why our purpose is so meaningful. Our brands exist to create more moments of goodness. It's not just what we do, it's what the world needs right now.

This profound mission is why I am so passionate about our amazing brands. So far, our brands have grown by being ubiquitous with high reach, high awareness, high distribution, but what got us here will not necessarily get us to the next stage of growth. In a highly competitive market, it's not enough to be just visible and available.

Our next advantage isn't more reach, it's more resonance. Reach gets you seen, but resonance gets you chosen. Our brand building model focuses on driving that resonance through five pillars. Elevating our consumer understanding by linking market signals with household level insights, building brand strategies that address consumer opportunities and barriers, telling meaningful and consistent brand stories across a modern and influential media ecosystem and measuring the impact in real time, enabling quick and effective resource allocation.

We're anchoring to clear measurable outcomes that can enable us to track and accelerate our progress across key metrics and drive productivity. An example of productivity is how we're using AI for content generation, media buying and performance optimization. So far, we've seen a 50% reduction in cost per asset versus traditional agency models, a reduction in creative time lines from months to weeks and the ability to localize our content to multiple markets in just days.

Our first example of using this model was our Reese's OREO launch campaign. This social-first campaign was anchored in cultural insights and relied on audience, targeting and real-time optimization. It generated billions of earned impressions and delivered 1.5x the effectiveness of previous Reese's campaigns. It also resonated with our growth audience. Reese's OREO has a 147 index with Gen Z, and that's one of the highest in the confection category.

I don't know if you can read some of these comments, but I certainly love my job. When I see people saying things like, this is the greatest day of my existence. And this helps make 2025 slightly more livable. The second way we're maximizing today's portfolio is to sharpen each brand's role in meeting consumer needs and occasions. We've renewed our insights work and map demand to the most important drivers of choice, functional and emotional needs.

Three terrains emerged, boost, connect and treat, and within those 12 distinct spaces, shaped by degree of nutrition orientation. It became clear there was material overlap in how we activated our portfolio. Our confection brands were clustered together, and we had gaps across large growing demand spaces. Our new strategy architects our brands to win across the demand landscape by minimizing overlap and positioning them to best deliver against the driving functional and emotional needs of the space. By extending our portfolio beyond just treating, we've tapped into a $300 billion total addressable market. And our ability to capture more occasions means more consumers, buying more units more often.

Take Hershey's as an example of how we're activating this approach. The brand is anchored in everyday comfort, a space driven by daily routines and the need for simple, familiar comforts in a hectic and uncertain life. We plan to increase our share of occasions in this large and important space by leaning into relevant moments big and small, and encouraging consumers to choose a little bit of happiness by choosing Hershey's.

First, we'll embed the brand in everyday rituals and consumption moments, seating Hershey's where little moments of comfort are needed. A mom putting a Kiss in her child's lunch box to show her love, college roommates sharing a cookies and cream bars as they study for a final, a caramel-filled indulgence enjoyed by a couple after a long day's work. More everyday moments means more units. And yes, those are all examples from my life.

We'll also make sure Hershey's is top of mind when people come together to celebrate big cultural moments like sporting events and holidays. We launched our new, It's Your Happy Place campaign at the Olympics, telling the story of how happiness is the real gold and capturing the hearts of millions of Team USA fans. And later this summer, when everyone's watching the World Cup, we'll celebrate our very own hometown hero and one of the stars of the Men's National team, Christian Pulisic. These will be holistic campaigns activated through our new brand building model where we surround the consumer across all touch points. But to give you just a flavor, let's watch the films that anchor these two cultural events.

[Presentation]

So we plan to use this approach across the entire portfolio and it will enable us to scale our next brands to $1 billion. Dot's, KitKat, Ice Breakers and Jolly Rancher stretch us beyond treat into the growing boost and connect demand spaces. They have momentum already, and we have plans to aggressively invest in innovation and consumer engagement opportunities.

On Dot's, we plan to expand to new formats and pack types and find opportunities to disrupt additional snacking categories, the way we're doing with Snack Mix. KitKat is a global powerhouse. We are relaunching the brand in the U.S. next year with an improved product and a big marketing push to drive reappraisal and take ownership of the modern break. Ice Breakers is in a category that has tailwinds with growth cohorts like GLP-1 users. To capitalize, we're launching new more portable formats and exploring functional benefits.

And finally, Jolly Rancher will continue to grow with Gen Z as the brand brings its bold iconic fruit flavors to additional markets, forms and eating experiences. To complement the growth in our current portfolio, we will be innovating for the future of demand. This means building technical capability to deliver advantaged organic innovations as well as continually evaluating opportunities for M&A. We'll be focusing our efforts against four territories, where we see $1.5 billion of incremental sales opportunity over the next 5 years. These territories are grounded in our understanding of white spaces in our demand map as well as consumer dynamics that impact how preferences are evolving.

We'll also continue our efforts in core brand renovation to defend product superiority and create incremental and exciting new takes on existing favorites. We're leveraging more technology and AI across ideation, concept testing and commercialization. And recently, we introduced our new Velocity Labs enterprise, which allows us to move fast to meet the evolving needs of consumers. We're using this capability to capitalize on emerging trends, test and optimize and market and drive excitement around limited time drops. Taken together, this will result in our 3-year innovation contributing a high single-digit percentage of revenue, and that's an industry-leading number.

Now let's get into the territories. The first is premiumization. Across CPG categories, premium demand is accelerating, driven by higher income consumers and Gen Z purchasing power. The brands that are winning offer a combination of indulgence, quality, better-for-you credentials and elevated packaging.

Our pipeline is focused on bringing new benefits to the segment. Democratizing luxury with accessible brands and price points, creating expressive social-first indulgent experiences that resonate with Gen Z and expanding our permissible portfolio. Functional snacking demand is also growing significantly as consumers prioritize nutrition and wellness benefits and seek to get more out of their snacks. We have a robust innovation roadmap that includes the following: better-for-you offerings that reduce sugar and other ingredients without compromising taste, performance-focused propositions, such as our reformulated one bar with a stack claim of complete protein plus fiber plus low sugar, customized nutrition that leverages our JV partner, VitaKey, and its proprietary technology, enabling precision time release nutrients like protein and fiber.

Just imagine a snack that can deliver benefits where, when and how your body needs them. And what we call Snacking Plus, which adds functional ingredients to favorite brands like Ice Breakers and LesserEvil to drive new consumption occasions. The third territory is multisensorial. We know consumers, and Gen Z in particular, are increasingly drawn to unexpected flavor profiles and textures, fueled by a social-first food culture that celebrates discovery and novelty. Our offerings will include adventurous on-trend flavors, new-to-the-world textures and playful interactive forms and exciting new eating experiences that marry global tastes and cross-category fusions.

Finally, consumers increasingly expect offerings that feel personal and occasion-specific and are willing to pay a premium for products that are bespoke. The need for gifting is universal to show care and connect with the people you love and consumers are increasingly turning to confection to meet this need under rising economic pressure. Our plan includes an array of curated assortments for a variety of occasions, just as a Dot's wing flavor pack for the football season as well as elevated gifting offerings for everyday celebrations like birthdays and big seasonal moments.

To enable this pipeline, we're making a significant investment in our R&D capabilities. A 25% increase will fund talent and technology to enable ingredient and recipe enhancements, advantaged taste delivery and nutrition science. With this is a renewed commitment to product superiority and quality. We continuously review recipes behind our most beloved brands to ensure every size, shape and flavor continue to deliver the experience consumers expect and that every ingredient earns its place.

As part of that process, we're making some updates to our products. We're enhancing our KitKat recipe to deliver a creamier chocolate, transitioning our sweets portfolio to colors from natural sources and ensuring that all Hershey's and Reese's offerings are consistent with their brands, classic milk and dark chocolate recipes. We're also investing in technical capabilities in areas like protein quality and delivery systems with the goal of differentiating our product claims and driving advantage.

We will continue to complement organic innovation with M&A to go after white spaces within snacking. When we have a gap in capability where our brands cannot authentically stretch to an attractive space, targeted M&A is a great solution to help us enter or scale efficiently and lower our risk exposure. For example, we recently added LesserEvil, which is an on-trend brand with strong credentials and the ability to enter new categories, which allows us to scale our Salty Snacking platform even faster.

As a result, our portfolio of the future will be more diversified and geared towards the fastest-growing segments of snacking with a larger position in functional snacking, better-for-you and premium, sweets, International and salty where the market is large and growing. I'll leave you with this. Snacking is a large, resilient and growing category. Consumer needs are evolving and the opportunity for Hershey's is significant. We have a clear actionable road map to capture that opportunity, and we are actively shaping our portfolio mix to support sustained long-term growth.

Thank you very much for your time today. And now I'll turn it over to Andrew.

Thank you, Stacy, and good afternoon, everyone. Pleasure to be with you here today. You saw on Kirk's opening, we talked about the operating model, demand creation, commercial excellence, demand fulfillment. It was the slide with our beautiful headshots on it. And Stacy just took you through what our plans are for NextGeneration demand creation growth. I'm going to spend the next 15 minutes talking about our commercial capabilities and why they're going to deliver disproportionate core growth, but also growth in disruptor categories that we're in, salty, functional protein and the future of the portfolio that Stacy just shared.

If you think about our commercial capabilities, reality is the delivering now. And we have a lot of proof points in the market in our current results. I encourage you, all of you to go to our breakout session this afternoon. You'll see a lot from the team on what is actually in the market and coming to the market quickly. It is the foundation for why we believe now is the time to leverage our One Hershey, go-to-market model that Kirk talked about. And all of this is in support of our short-term and long-term algorithm goals, which is top line growth. Marketing and trade reinvestment and getting more working return from what we invest in the market and ultimately, margin restoration.

In simplest terms, our commercial goals and resource support three things: Availability, affordability and activation at retail. Now this is probably not any of your first Investor Days. You hear a lot of CPG companies talk about those 3 As, so to speak. The difference for us is that we've got a lot of sophistication in our commercial work. And then we're -- we have meaningful trends happening in our categories, predominantly better-for-you, functional and premium, which is why our categories have more disproportionate growth than others. So when you put those two things together, we think our take-home aisle and our digital aisle are going to have several years of growth, and it's a difference.

Secondly, we have world-class revenue growth management capabilities. And you'll continue to see that in our evolving price pack architecture. That allows us to drive value to the category, but also address affordability with a lot of flexibility with pack types and price. And we have a world-class retail team, 1,100 people that are in the market today that are already executing and driving our activation. The opportunity is that we're able to use technology, gain productivity and leverage their time to spend more time on our portfolio and outlets, take away time that has nothing to do with selling and essentially deliver a better return for every retail asset we get from a retailer.

And that's what our customers demand. And when they get that, they usually reward us with more and more assets, and this model is going to allow us in a One Hershey model to get that greater return. So let me start with availability. Some of us, as you may know, had portions of our career in other industries, mine for one was beverage. If you walk down the beverage aisle today, you -- regardless of the company or the brands, you largely see package uniformity. You'll see the immediate consumption packages look the same.

The take-home packages look the same. And it's, in some ways, a fairly easy aisle to shop. Confection is a different story in that regard comparatively. You've got a lot of SKUs. You see a lot of package differentiation and variety is important, but the ability for a consumer to navigate that is just in a different cycle than it is in other categories. Our data tells us that 23 plus percent of the time. Shoppers are going to spend less than a minute, trying to find what they want. If they can't do that, they're going to move on. So we've got to be on the forefront of what that aisle looks like.

You'll see later today, we're taking some leadership roles in our stand-up packaging. So moving from lay-down bags to stand-up bags, bringing a much more billboard effect to the aisle. What that does is it allows consumers to understand not only what they're buying, but they over time, what our price slope and curve is.

We're trusted experts in this space today. So when retailers ask us to help them redefine the aisle, when we combine our new standup packaging, a cleaner architecture plus our other gold standards, we're seeing a 19% lift in confection and a 12% lift in our salty portfolio. So these are some of the reasons we see core portfolio growth in front of us. The other interesting distinction is because there's so much proliferation of SKUs, our 100 top revenue-producing items are only in about 60 ACV in the total marketplace. Again, big distinction from other categories. What that simply tells us is we're going to get that to a 90% ACV and get more growth from core because, again, we're going to bring more uniformity to the aisle.

And then finally, we see category expansion in the sense of Zero Sugar is in the early innings in this category. Better-for-you, we're only in 8 share with a huge runway of growth. Premiumization is ongoing. So there's a good way to get price and mix. So we're already a leader in some of these areas. We are the leaders in Zero Sugar. And ultimately, we see retailers taking from less productive categories into our aisle. And there's, from our assessment, easily 4 feet available to expand in these faster-growing areas.

The structure of our hierarchy and architecture really important. The point of doing this well is that we can address everything from an opening price point all the way to a value per piece and have a very curve that consumers understand. We can also address portion control and we can also address calories per piece. And bringing this standardization to the category in the aisle over time, it just means we're going to get more household penetration and much more conversion.

Our ultimate objective, and you heard that from consistently through Kirk and through Stacy is, we want everything on the aisle out of the Hershey portfolio to have a clear reason for existing, a clear occasion that it impacts and that it can be done at scale versus subscale and just having the aisle clogged with items that ultimately won't produce in the long run. A couple of more examples. We're entering into single-serve in some of our faster-growing and premium brands. The single-serve option in Dot's. We're going to -- we're already launching a single-serve option in Brookside. Again, these aren't inherently different from other CPGs, but for us, they represent a real meaningful move into high-margin areas like the front of the store, strike zone and convenience retail. We just simply have more headway in those areas than others.

And then finally, we can go in other channels. We're particularly excited about the on-premise. There's a lot of opportunity to drive trial in the on-premise for our brands. In fact, our Dot's new package was just available on Delta Airlines from a trial perspective. So with a good price pack architecture, we can definitely run our affordability curve better. What I would remind everyone is we're very intentional about that. 75% of our portfolio today is still at $4 or below.

And then we're introducing things that we see that are important to consumers at macro scale. One of those is a variety pack at an opening price point. And then a $5 seasonal offering that we'll put in the market this year, particularly for the dollar and value channel. So because we have flexibility and because we can produce an architecture that is working and going in a value way, we can have price and mix and margin to what we do.

So we're going to balance revenue. We're going to balance units. We're going to balance margin. And then we're going to activate again, I thought Stacy did a really good job of talking about some of the great assets we receive essentially as we commercialize and then bring them to retail.

To begin with Reese's OREO has been and is a cultural phenomenon, two mega brands come together. What's been very interesting is when we merchandise those brands together with core Reese's and core Hershey, we can grow out of both. And predominantly, this product hasn't really hit the aisles yet. We largely launched this off-aisle. So we now go into resets -- in the reset season we're in today.

Pokémon, we're in the 30th anniversary of Pokémon. So we now have parents and children, two generations. It's a wonderful partnership and asset for us. We've activated it at back-to-school time. Where we've activated it, we see a 10% lift in velocity and we see repeats because the collectability of this is important to consumers. As importantly, we had 120 million plus impressions on what Gen Alpha and Gen Z care about, which is effectively TikTok, Snapchat, Meta. So again, great assets means that we can be very resonant.

Twizzlers, it's a 100-year-old brand. Again, by watching social media, we didn't invent the dirty soda or dirty pop phenomenon. It's largely been on reality shows and online, but -- and hopefully, you got to sample it earlier today in the Velocity Lab that Stacy talked about, we brought a product to market. We didn't test it in focus groups. We tested it with consumers in a limited time offer, and now we know that it's going to work and we can scale it really quickly next year.

So I think there's many of these opportunities where even our legacy brands will benefit from how we look at the world. So putting it all together, availability, affordability, activation. It's one of the reasons that Dot's is, maybe it's #1 in the Pretzels category, a category that hasn't had much growth. We do have #1 and #2 share, respectively, on confection, salty and digital. And yet, we still have so much headroom versus our brick-and-mortar share for lack of a better term. Reese's did $100 million in 5 months, again, largely off shelf. It drove 8% of the category growth, and our sweets business last year delivered at 3x the category growth rate, and we're in 8% share. So again, when I think about the proof points of why our core portfolio is right for growth, those are the reasons that give us a lot of confidence.

So we talked about, as Kirk mentioned, now it's time to put this all together. We're going to put confection leadership together with our disruptor brands. What I would say here is I get a lot of questions sometimes of why now? Why is this the time to do it? And what I would share is, Hershey's already been on this journey for a while. Some of it starts with the portfolio. So it's been a really intentional M&A strategy. Obviously, no SkinnyPop, Pirate's Booty and Dot's and now LesserEvil.

In addition, our supply chains and systems are already all integrated. So the same processes we use in one category, we use in the other. Our retail teams have actually already been selling both categories in convenience retail for the better part of 2 years. And finally, and maybe one of the most important reasons, our customers have just been asked for it now. They see the growth of Hershey over time being a total snacking company. Obviously, they're trying to unlock value in really important areas and because the portfolio now is at scale, they're asking us to bring them advice across broader snacking than just core confection.

And some of those proof points have just gained us total snacking advisorship in some material CR customers, convenience retail customers and mass customers. Some other benefits are fairly obvious. We no longer just stay category-to-category investment we can bring portfolio investment, which means we can unlock more. We already know that these categories merchandise well together. There's a lot of cross basket. So that just makes sense. We talked about the tentpoles we're going to invest in.

Again, there's no reason to execute a tentpole on just one side of the portfolio when consumers are buying the total portfolio. And we have a retail team to do that and execute it without having to build it. And finally, we'll get some real investment and ROI back from our trade that prior to this was directed in just specific areas versus the total portfolio. So we'll reduce redundant programming, we'll have better development costs. We'll just get a better ROI on what we put into the marketplace.

This is what we want to see in market. Again, Kirk shared this as, call it, the ultimate movie night, I think the point being is these products are brought together already, our brands are beloved already. These being beacon end caps at the end of the aisle, produce growth for those that even walk ] the aisle. We see 5,000 opportunities in small format alone just to bit with the strike zone together with our brands, and probably 1,500 to 2,000 more in the next year just in large format. So again, the way we can show up in market just looks very different. It produces just a better ROI for everyone involved.

Our tentpoles. We're a seasonal leader, you know that, because you've seen the last 5 years of annual share growth in seasons. We're going to do near $3 billion or over $3 billion in retail shortly in seasons, yet there's spikes in the business when you do that. Tentpole brings you a much more even and always-on approach to our brands. And the reality is there's cultural moments all the time. Every year, we'll produce cultural moments.

We have a fairly interesting one next year where Valentine's Day and Super Bowl happen to be on the same day, hasn't necessarily occurred before. But if in our prior model, we would have gone to retailers to talk about this important event in two different teams, and we would add half the value out versus what we'll bring to the market for Super Valentine's Day next February.

A couple of other proof points in market now, obviously, in March Madness, I think I heard Kirk Sarah Izen picked the same final 4 teams I did as well. So I'm in that camp because Braylon Mullins has hit a shot around the world. And clearly, now you know, I'm a Yukon fan. But very important, but the point is we would have merchandised just Reese before. Now in the marketplace, we've got the entire -- our entire portfolio. We have Shaq-A-Licious, which is relevant. We have Dot's, which is relevant. And even some of our own hosting of parties for NCA, all our brands were represented because they were represented at retail, and we can buy them.

We'll do an amazing job of stores like we always do, but this year gives us the chance to do that in 250th America Way of the Country. We'll add salty offerings to this as well. More than likely in everything we do in the future, you will always see more of the portfolio. Again, they go together. They're in the baskets already, and we have the retail team to do it. So that expansion feels natural to us, but the occurrences and the amount of times that it will grow will be much greater than we've seen before.

So why can't we do it at retail? One of our big advantages is technology. Obviously, we're all benefiting from speed and productivity and technology in our world. We have handheld technology that we've always had. It is leading in that area, but 3 things have changed. One, we can get salty data and sales insights into our iPads overnight, which we did. We also are using AI dynamic routing, so our reps are no longer just going to a set of outlets that it was on their list. They now go to highly productive ones. They can change at any time. It's iterative. We simply remove a lot of non-selling drive time and a non-selling productive prep time, unproductive prep time.

Finally, we've got visual identity on our iPads. You'll see a demonstration of this later today, where we can literally show a retailer exactly what would be in their store on a visual screen, here's the footprint size. Here's the quantity, here's what it will retail at. Here are the turns, here's the margin, and they're getting an order much faster. So technology is going to simply without raising our costs, predominantly get us in more outlets, touching more of our portfolio, and that's the goal.

And then again, along our trade in our marketing investment. We already have a target out this year to get 15% of nonworking trade converted to working trade. And one of the main reasons we'll do that is because, again, we'll have programming that is no longer separate but in one spot, where we'll get a greater return, we'll get a greater velocity, so will the retail partner, and you'll hear about one of those examples in the breakout today.

We're using AI to track all of our promotions in the confection world, they're already doing 80% of it. We'll get to 100% of it with salty this year. It means things like in the past where it might have taken a few analysts to look at a 2 for 5 promotion and say, "Well, is that worth repeating a month from now in two other channels." We're getting that back in minutes. And so we're adjusting our promotional strategy constantly in a much more iterative world and by channel, which gives us less waste, greater return, better margins.

So we put it all together, we feel very confident, this is the right strategy. Our confection business is going to benefit from ACV growth. It's going to benefit still from tentpole growth. It's going to benefit from category expansion, especially in the areas that we see are fast growing. Our Salty business is going to benefit from increased distribution because it's still behind some of the distribution points in our confection business. And we're going to reach new occasion, new consumers through new occasions and packaging.

So as I leave you too close, we already have leading commercial capabilities today. One Hershey is going to unlock a lot more of that opportunity. And finally, we'll be in more doors, more occasion, more outlets using technology to leverage our cost and our speed and we see just significant opportunity in front of us. We have the teams, we have the model, we have the capability. Most importantly, we have the portfolio to win.

So thank you. glad to spend some time with you today. I look forward to some Q&A, hopefully, with some of you in a little while. We're going to take a short break. And then when we come back, Jason Reiman, our Chief Supply Chain Officer, will take you through that third important part of our operating model, demand fulfillment. Thank you.

[Break]

Please welcome to the stage, Jason Reiman, Chief Supply Chain officer.

Good afternoon. All right. Welcome back from your break. Did everybody get to enjoy some of our great tasting products. Any favorites out there. The Dirty Soda. All right, straws, wiser straws, there we go. When Kirk opened up, he talked about how we're emerging stronger as an organization following the cocoa inflation. I would say one of the reasons that we're emerging stronger is because of the investments that we're making around modernizing our supply chain.

You heard Stacy talk about how we're generating demand by connecting our consumers with our iconic brands to create more moments of goodness. Andrew talked about retail excellence, and how we're working with our retail partners to bring together salty and sweets to make sure that we can drive that One Hershey approach an advantage. I get the privilege of leading our demand fulfillment. And when people ask me what the core of my job is at a basic level, what is it that I'm supposed to do? It's to make sure that every time a consumer goes to buy our product, it's available. It delivers against that high-quality experience they expect from our brands. It also has to be a value, some consumer will spend their hard-earned money on, and they have to see it as sustainable.

Now there are two important roles in the supply chain. The first is we have to drive growth through an efficient and agile fulfillment process. The second is we have to fund the future through productivity so that we can reinvest in our brands, and our capabilities and in our margin. And while our supply chain is stronger, we can't be complacent. We have to look at how we reinvent the supply chain, looking at how we source our products, how we think about our network, and how that network needs to evolve and then also thinking about how we leverage technology to take it to the next level from a productivity standpoint.

Towards the end of my presentation, we'll go deeper into that on how we are leveraging technology to help modernize our supply chain.

And when I say that we're stronger, it's because of the investments that we've made. We've invested in core brand capacity like Reese's. That's enabled innovation like Reese's OREO. We've also invested in chocolate resiliency in a modernized chocolate manufacturing plant right in Hershey, Pennsylvania. We also have multi-category assets. We're able to produce our Salty Snacks in-house. And we've laid the digital foundation with a digital backbone as well as our S/4 investments, and you heard Andrew talk about how that creates synergies, and how we bring that sweet and salty portfolio together.

And I'm really excited about how we're looking at technology to help drive productivity into the future. But first, let's start with our ingredient resiliency. And ingredient resiliency is all about making sure we have long-term sustainability. It's making sure that we have reliability of those ingredients and it make sure that we have affordability of those ingredients. We do comprehensive assessments of both social and environmental opportunities on all the ingredients that we source. But when I talk about ingredients, there's no more strategic ingredient to us than cocoa. And when I think about cocoa and our capabilities, I think about a competitive advantage. And that advantage comes from our team, our process and our technology.

We've invested in more market intelligence, more information, gaining insights on what's happening. We've invested in technology so we can have a better understanding of where supply and demand changes are happening. And we have a sophisticated tool set for hedging. And when you combine that with our market intelligence and our disciplined process and governance around how we manage our commodities, it allows us to ensure that we're going to deliver against our plans. We're able to reduce volatility and that we have prices that are competitive versus our peer set.

And one of the ways that we measure that value is through a systematic -- as comparing versus a systematic buying approach. And you can see over the last 10 years, our teams have outperformed that systematic approach. We're able to do that because we have disciplined processes and governance. We're able to leverage our market intelligence, and we're able to take advantage of our category strategies based on the dynamics of the market. That's what creates the advantage.

Now the world is ever evolving. And we need to be able to anticipate change that's happening to make sure that our supply chain remains resilient. And one of the structural changes that you're seeing is in cocoa production. Just 5 years ago, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana would represent almost 2/3 of the world's cocoa production. Today, they're less than 50%. You have new markets emerging areas in South America, like Ecuador, which has increased their production by over 50% over the last 3 years. And you've had Brazil state their aspirations to double the amount of their cocoa production as well. Now this means two things for us. It means that we have to make sure that we have the right capabilities to take advantage of where our beans are sourced, and we're doing that through some of our R&D investments.

And second, it also says that at the current cocoa prices that it still remain above historical levels, it will encourage more cocoa production, which actually is good for long-term supply. But we also take a long-term approach to cocoa. And one of the ways that we do that is through our Hershey Income Accelerator program. That program develops long-term contracts with farmers in Cote d'Ivoire to make sure that we put in good agricultural practices, help them improve productivity and overall family income. We're also investing in R&D. And one of the areas that we're investing in is behind the cacao tree resiliency, ensuring that it's resilient against disease and drought.

And we continue to invest around direct sourcing from origin as well as our ability to look at cocoa alternatives. Once we have a resilient supply network, we can turn in to how we think about an agile network. And when I think about agility, I think about making sure that we have the right capacity for growth. We have the right capabilities to meet the needs of both our consumers and customers, and we have the right resiliency to ensure service as well as be able to manage through disruptions. From a capacity standpoint, we've continued to invest behind our core brands like Reese's, Hershey's, KitKat, Jolly Rancher.

From a capability standpoint, we're able to produce in-house Pretzels and popcorn. And this has allowed those brands to scale to the #1 position in their categories. And when I think about resiliency, it's about making sure that we have modernized chocolate producing assets, and we built a world-class modern chocolate-making facility in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and it's our first fully digitally integrated facility in the network.

But our network is never static. It's always evolving. When I think about our chocolate network, I think about scale and efficiency. No one can make our products more efficiently than we can, but there's always opportunity to optimize. There's always opportunity to add new capabilities to that network. When I think about sweets, I think about how we leverage our current assets to bring new forms, flavors and textures. And a great example of that is Jolly Rancher ropes.

With Jolly Rancher ropes, we're able to use an existing technology to bring a new form to Jolly Rancher that actually resonates with the younger consumers. And then when we talk about the salty network, this is where it really gets fun because we've been investing ahead of that growth to make sure that we can continue to accelerate growth in those categories. In the future, we see more geographic expansion that allows us to be closer to our customers and help us provide a better margin. And from a functional snacking standpoint, we continue to work with outside external partners to bring new products to market even faster.

Now there's always a balance on how we look at the network between internal and external manufacturing. And our partners that we leverage externally are an important part of our network. They allow us to bring innovation. They allow us to scale our brands. In chocolate, it's mature and well balanced. In Salty, we've actually gone from 100% external manufacturing to over 80% internal over the last 5 years. 100% external to over 80% internal over the last 5 years. What this has allowed us to do is actually accelerate the growth of these businesses. It helps ensure that we have the right quality of our products, and it helps us to improve our margins.

And now let me talk about how we're investing in technology to fund the future. And when you think about technology to fund the future, everyone needs a best friend at work. And my best friend at work is Deepak, our Chief Technology Officer. Because in supply chain, nothing really moves ahead without technology. And Deepak and I have partnered together to look at the key parts and key aspects of our supply chain, how we source, how we make, how we deliver, and how we plan. We've implemented technologies in each of these areas.

From a sourcing standpoint, we're investing in spend visibility, so we understand where we are versus our competition, and should cost modeling. This allows us to give sharper category strategies to our sourcing team. From a make standpoint, we've implemented connected worker. This allows every worker or every operator on our factory floor to understand the efficiency of how our line is running. And if there is a problem, what are the root causes, and what are the corrective actions you take to make sure that we get it fixed immediately.

Now let me take you into two other examples of how we're looking at deliver and plan. From a delivery standpoint, we've implemented something called precision assortments. This is our ability to create assortments that have the right brands and the right count, unique to every store. So you're basically leveraging the geo-demographic data from each store to help bring our immediate consumption products, and it starts with how we would work with our sales team to actually create the unit based on that data.

We've actually invested in automation on how you assemble these units and think about LEGOs that get put together to create these merchandising displays, and that we're able to bring that to market to actually create that store of the community type of feel. This is an area I called simplified complexity because we're able to do more precision assortments in an actually simpler way. And it will allow us to reduce our lead time by 50% from the conception to the delivery of that unit. And it will ultimately allow us to drive more sales by having our product in more locations.

The other technology I want to talk about is decision intelligence. And think about decision intelligence as sitting at a layer above our supply chain. It's taking information all across our supply chain. And it's sensing what's happening, it's making sense of it, and it's creating an automatic response. And we're seeing some good results from our investments in the technology.

An example of how this might be used, if you think we're -- you're on a factory floor. And our production is actually running ahead of our plan, and we needed to expedite packaging. This would automatically send that signal to make sure that, that packaging was sent to the line because it was sensing that was happening. Now there are thousands of decisions that happen every day across complex supply chains. And we see decision intelligence as an opportunity to increase productivity by $50 million and reduce our inventory by $100 million over the next 2 years.

I said one of our most important jobs was fun in the future. And we do that through our productivity. If I take a look at our pipeline for productivity for 2026, I'm feeling fairly well, but what makes me feel even better is that these investments that we're making in technology help us ensure that we have a pipeline for 2027 and beyond, and that helps us fuel the flywheel. The more productivity that we can generate, the more we can reinvest back in our business, the more we can invest back in our business, the more we can grow. And the more we can grow, the more opportunities we have to find productivity. I hope you've got a sense for how we're investing and modernizing our supply chain, and how we're looking at technology to help create better resiliency, better agility with our network, and that we're able to help drive growth for the business as well as fund its future through productivity.

And with that, I'm going to turn it over to my good friend, Steve Voskuil, to wrap this all together.

Good afternoon. I'm a little disappointed because I thought I was Jason's best friend at work, but I'm not going to take it personally. It's great to be with you today. By virtue of my spot in the batting order, I also have the privilege today of tying everything together. And so we're going to build up the story that ultimately leads to NextGen financial performance. And we're going to do it methodically. So I'm going to walk through each segment. For each segment, I'm going to go through top line drivers. I'm going to go through bottom line drivers. Then we'll synthesize all of that into a look at the enterprise P&L going forward, again, top line and bottom line. From there, we'll push that through to cash flow, and we'll talk about our capital allocation framework, which many of you have seen before. And finally, we're going to conclude today with what we believe is a really compelling investment thesis for this company at this point in time. So that's where we're going to go. I want to make sure that you have some clear takeaways here as well.

And I'll give you two meta takeaways that I would start with. One is, and you heard it from Kirk right out of the gate this morning, we are stronger today than we were two years ago before we faced some of the commodity inflation we had to deal with. This was not two years of playing defense. And this was two years of investing in talent, investing in our brands, investing in our supply chain, as Jason just said, and investing in innovation and R&D capabilities. Now we're going to take that to another level, but this spot we're in right now is stronger even than we were before we face those challenges. The second key takeaway is that we're not going to use -- or we're going to use the commodity recovery period to be thoughtful and create advantage that will be durable on the top line and bottom line.

So with that, let's get started by taking a look at the segments. And here, I think it's always good. Let's start with the end in mind. And just as a reminder, the end for North America confection is to be the undisputed leader in this category. That means we want to be the market share leader, we want to be the innovation leader, we want to be the best at retail execution and partnering with our customers, and of course, we want to have the best products, most delicious products and best innovation.

In Salty, we're already -- it's already our fastest-growing segment, and the opportunity for us here is to strive to be #2 in Salty Snacking. We've already gone from 5 to 4. 3 is within reach, but we want more. We want to be a strong #2, and we're going to talk about how we do that.

Third, we want to have our International business return to its rightful place as both a strong grower and with a profitable and investable P&L behind it. And then finally, we've touched on functional snacking, which will serve as an additional lift for initially North America confection, but also eventually the Salty Snacking business.

So let's start breaking down the businesses, and we're going to start with what matters most, the North America confection business. Nothing is more important than our success in continuing to drive and build this business on both the top and even the bottom line. So we're going to -- as you know, our guidance for this year is around 3% organic growth, we expect long term, this business can do 2% to 4% organically. And you can see here some of the drivers behind that. Strong ROIs against our brand building. You heard all day about our brand building in this space. We've got a lot of investments, but also we don't make those without requiring strong returns. You've heard about our focus on innovation, including a differential investment in R&D to set up not only innovation now, but innovation and the credentials behind innovation in things like nutrition science for the future.

And then I would call attention to probably 3 and 5 on this page together. On 5 strategic pricing is always going to be important to us in this category. It will look different in the future than it did the last two years, where we know we've had price-driven growth out of necessity due to high commodity costs that we had to deal with, but we're going to balance that in the future with number three, which is driving occasion and unit growth as well as price. And long term for this business, we know the healthiest position is a top line that has the balance of both strategic pricing and thoughtful unit and occasion delivery.

On the bottom line, we know this business can get back next year into the space it needs to be from an operating margin standpoint. You can see the levers here, and you've already heard the team talk about many of these continuing to leverage strategic pricing in the future will be a factor, leveraging our scale and network optimization off the back of some of these capability investments that Jason just talked about. Tech fueled productivity even in the SG&A area as well as premiumization, and you can see also where we're going to invest, areas like continuing to improve our recipes to go where consumers are going with their evolving palates, innovation, R&D and, of course, brand building.

So Salty. Salty, as I said, we want to get this business to a strong #2 position. That means from an organic standpoint, mid-single digits this year and a strong mid-single-digit grower from here forward. To do that, if you look across the bottom, a couple of areas we're going to focus. Of course, we're going to focus first with our core brands in Salty. SkinnyPop and Dot's are fantastic. They're differentiated. Dot's in particular, is on a tear, and we're going to continue to drive growth in those brands. In addition, we're going to drive into spaces where we should be, especially categories that have shown an opportunity for us to disrupt and bring something new. As you said, in front of you, you have our mix -- our Salty Snack mix. That's a good example of a category that was due for some renovation and some updates and some clear branding to take it to another level.

Pirate's Booty is another. That's a brand to be honest, we probably should be doing more with already. And now we're going to have an opportunity to reinvigorate that brand and relaunch that brand into the big space of permissible kids snacking, which we have a right to play in, and we have the assets to win.

And then third, LesserEvil. LesserEvil is a great acquisition. It is doing so far everything we expected it to do. But you'll recall that when we bought that business, as much as we love the brand, and we love the spaces it's in, we also have aspirations to take that brand elsewhere. One of the unique things about that brand is its portability.

And so as we think about the future of permissible snacking, this is an opportunity for the LesserEvil platform to take us into that space. When I look at profitability, again, we want to have this business get over 20% from a margin standpoint, and we know there's a big player in this market that has a margin structure that looks very different than ours, has much greater scale. It's probably not credible for us to be targeting that margin structure, but we want to be pushing up towards the top quartile of margin players in this space. And we do believe that's within reach.

To do that, we've talked already about some of the opportunities here. Scale is a big one for this business as we now, again, bring in LesserEvil as we execute One Hershey. One of the smart things we did, again, a couple of years ago was get this business onto our new ERP platform, and that has unlocked enormous opportunity to continue building scale and driving automation. We're going to continue to extract all the synergies that we committed to, not just in the LesserEvil deal, but in the other M&A deals that we have put together to build this business. And as you heard Andrew talk about, retail execution is also a great opportunity for this business.

So let's talk about international. Last but not least, again, we want to move out of the challenging period that we have and get back to it from low single digit, eventually solid mid-single-digit growth. It's no secret. This business has been the most impacted by the commodity cycle. Part of that is because it's more premium positioned in many markets, and we have more elasticity impact. Some of that is the focus on cocoa in these markets.

And some of it, frankly, is our lack of scale in some markets in particular, but as you heard from Kirk, the opportunity here is to refocus, don't miss the opportunity to look at this business critically and say, okay, how can we set it up for stronger future performance. By focusing on core markets where we know we can bring the things we're good at, cultural relevance, scale, great marketing and great network execution. That will also follow through from a profitability standpoint where we get this business, again, back up to the profitability that we've had before and then leverage the skills and the strength of our overall business to drive it further.

So what does that do then for the enterprise? We've put together here a framework. So you can see a little bit how we think about where value is created in this business. As you've heard today, you were in great categories. They are strong, resilient categories. In those categories, we have iconic brands. Among those iconic brands, some of our biggest brands outperformed these great categories. So right there, an excellent starting point for value creation.

We have identified white spaces that we have a right to win in, that we already have brands that can play in, and we have the ability with our retail team to execute against. We talked about balanced revenue growth. International and Salty will definitely be volume-driven growth, but as we bring the North America balance and confection, enterprise top line growth, it's also going to be more balanced between price and capturing units and occasions.

We're going to continue to reinvest and we're going to continue to bring class-leading margins. And while we're confident we'll get back into the margin range of the past quickly, what's probably two more important points to take away here is that, one, we see that not as the end goal, but as the new platform for modest expansion thereafter. And second, while we love gross margin, it's a great indicator of the value of our brands. We're also not going to target fixate only on margin, we want to capture incremental profit dollars into the business from these white spaces where we're going. All of that leads to strong cash generation and then puts in our hands to our disciplined capital allocation to drive value for shareholders.

If you look at the top line, again, just to break this down and we've talked about it a bit already, right now, we're coming off a period of out of necessity, price-led growth to a period where we're going to begin shifting the balance between strategic price and also occasion and unit growth. So that by the time we get to 2028 and beyond, we've got a much more balanced top line delivery.

On the bottom line, we're going to see our margins next year, be back into the range, I would call it, the historic ZIP code for this business. Again, not as the end goal in itself, but to establish a new place from which we can continue to drive scale and productivity to take it to another level.

We know that we have some investments we're going to continue to make to do that. And we're also -- we also don't have our heads in the sand about headwinds, but as we look at the tailwinds and we look at the ROIs that we're going to get off the back of these investments, we believe that will more than compensate for the headwinds.

I have to take a minute to celebrate the transformation savings that we are in the process of delivering. As you know, by the end of this year, we will sunset the transformation program. And by the time we're done, we will have over-delivered the savings and underspent the onetime cost to do it.

And you can see on the screen, it's split between Jason's area and supply chain and also across SG&A. Perhaps the best thing in here, though, is that we have sustainable tech-enabled productivity that is going to continue to the future and not just continue in its current form, but again, serve as a base for further expansion of technology. And as Jason said, and you heard from Andrew as well, this is not a sort of pipe dream of the future. These things are happening already. We are already optimizing our trade spend. We are already leveraging integrated demand planning. We're already using holistic customer investment tools to manage our spend both in supply chain and SG&A. And we're going to be able to build on that for the future.

This is the slide, maybe the only slide you care about in my presentation, but -- and my feelings aren't hurt, but just to stop for a second. So 2026, as you saw this morning, we are reiterating our guide for the year. 2027 is going to be another year of sort of catch-up from an earnings standpoint. It will be outsized earnings delivery for next year. And longer term, we see 2% to 4% organic on the top line, and 6% to 8% on the bottom line. Now I will also say we're never satisfied, and we're always going to be pushing for more. We are a show it, don't tell it team. And so we're going to continue to leverage all the tools that you've heard about to drive performance.

We know when we do this, we'll generate a lot of cash flow. In fact, we generated a lot of cash flow even in the last two years with commodity inflation. What this does, though, is it allows us to level up. And so you can see, we'll have the earnings growth recovery, certainly will flow through. In addition, we'll have the transformation savings carrying forward. And as Jason said, 5 years ago, we were talking 1% productivity savings, now we're talking 3%. And technology beneath that will allow us to do even more.

Working capital, we don't even talk about working capital that often. In the last 5 years, we've dropped our cash conversion cycle by 40%. Brenda continue to press on that, and we're going to continue to press on that, and we're going to be very good stewards of the investment we make into the supply chain.

That leads to our capital allocation playbook or framework, and here, looks a lot like what we've had in the past. We want to first and foremost, invest in the business, both organically and inorganically, and I'll touch on M&A again, in just a moment, but here, we know these are the -- these ideas are the best return in most capital efficient things we can do to grow the core business, and we're going to always make sure that's fully funded. Second, we want consistent dividend growth, growing the dividend roughly in line with earnings over time, a payout over 50%.

We want to maintain a strong balance sheet because a strong balance sheet allows us to be agile and to pursue, weather the tough times, but more importantly, pursue the opportunities for growth as they present themselves. And then we love share repurchase because share repurchase puts tension in the rest of the equation. If we don't have great returning investments, leveraging the shareholders' money, we're going to give it back. As I said, we don't often do retrospectives on M&A. Internally, we do it all the time. In fact, with the Board, we do a deep dive every year of every asset on here, even the ones back to 2018. But we thought it would be helpful to just take a look back.

A few years ago, I think we had an earnings call, and we get the question, "Hey, how do you think about M&A? What's your appetite for M&A?" And I said, "We have a big appetite for M&A." And when you look at this in totality, you say, okay, yes, you've done a fair number of deals. If I was going to characterize it today, I'd probably say it a little bit differently. I'd probably say we have a targeted nutrition plan for M&A because we're picky.

We're looking for things that are going to make us stronger, going to make us more capable, unlock things that we can leverage with our own strengths. And as you look across those middle 3 rows, I'd say that's where we focus and that's where you should think about us focusing our M&A attention. That's the place where -- and I think we have a great M&A team. We don't want an asset to trade in that space that we don't know about, have a point of view on, have a value estimate for and make sure that every conversation we're part of when we want to be.

We're not perfect. And so you'll see here not everything has met our financial hurdles, but I would say even the two that we've missed, it might have been a case of a little before their time because as you've heard today, those are brands we're leaning into for activation as we look to the future. So as we kind of pull this section together, I want to share with you what we believe is a really compelling investment thesis for this time in history. I've said, we've got great categories. We've got iconic brands. Inside those brands, our biggest brands are growing even better than the categories, and we want more big brands.

We have a lot of headroom for expansion into these white space areas and not without having the right brands already, having the capabilities, the retail execution team to be able to do that. Such that 40% of our portfolio will evolve into those faster-growing areas. We have an opportunity for structural margin improvement beyond recovery. A lot of that backed by technology-enabled capabilities that we've invested in over the last two years. We're also always going to have this mix of strategic pricing being important to this business, but an ever-growing focus on balancing that with unit and occasion capture.

And finally, we know when we do those things, we generate significant cash flow. And we want to be the best capital allocators in our space. So as you listen to all of this, I would say it's a unique point in time, but it's not a terminal point. It's a point of departure for NextGen financial performance.

And so with that, I think we're going to get ready for some Q&A, and I look forward to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We are now ready to open it up for Q&A. I'm going to invite Kirk, Stacy, Andrew and Jason to join me on stage, and then we can get started. So I will direct the mic runners. There's 4 of them scattered around the room as we conduct the session. For the benefit of everyone in the room, if you could please -- before you ask your question, if you could please state your name and the firm that you represent. [Operator Instructions]

Okay. So we can start here with Michael.

Thank you, Michael Lavery, Piper Sandler. Great long-term color, also helpful to have a little more view on 2027. Obviously, it's a little early and much earlier than you would normally do that. So can you help us put it in a little bit of context in terms of what unknowns you recognized, maybe any vague idea of how much cocoa coverage you have because that's really a big consideration. And just a little bit of kind of building blocks for how you got there.

Yes. That's terrific. Steve, do you want to take that.

Yes, I'd be happy to.

Plays right off your last presentation.

You bet. So in terms of cocoa coverage, I say we have good visibility. So I don't think we feel comfortable putting up a slide without having good visibility into that volatile commodity. As we think about other puts and takes, we talked about price, obviously, we're going to have some carryover pricing benefit. We're going to have some investment areas, much of what you've heard here today. But we're also going to have productivity continue at the pace that Jason talked about. And so I'd say those are kind of the fundamental building blocks inside 2027.

We'll share more color obviously as we get further into the year. As far as the headwinds, what I would say is, we talked about this on an earnings call, whether it's SNAP or whether it's GLP-1s or Maha, we have teams internally that do nothing but obsess on those things to understand them, be in the markets, in the case of SNAP, take real-time feedback and feed it back into the team so that as we're looking at planning top to bottom, we have the best available information available as we set these kind of outlooks. Now we'll be wrong. I don't know where we'll be wrong, but we have -- we run scenarios, and we have the best available point of view that we try to incorporate into the outlook.

And just a follow-up, if I can, on the pricing piece of that. You mentioned there's some carryover. Obviously, the pricing environment has gotten a lot of attention in food and beverage and CPG. Can you give a sense of some of your considerations? It sounds like you clearly expect some positive pricing what, if anything, could change your mind is you've got volume momentum that suggest the consumer isn't pressing, but how do you think about just the pricing dynamics and maybe the retailer relationships and how that all adds up together.

Yes, let me take that for a second. Steve, you can join. We have a disciplined pricing approach. And Steve talked a little bit about it. But one, pricing to cover inflation. And so we were very patient in '25 and -- '24 and '25 to not pass all that pricing on, and we played the patient approach to recover that in '26 and '27. So that you can see the structure of that and it shows up in the algorithm, but that disciplined pricing is to cover commodities, and then other use other tools like mix things that drive mix or premium or single -- our immediate consumption business. Those drive positive mix. And so those are all tools that we're using.

We work with our retail partners on this. They also buy cocoa. They're in the market. So they see these things in real time. We also remain nimble with the competitive landscape, and we have tools to stay competitive. So this is a high-intensity operating environment that we live in, and we talk about these things every single day. So -- but in principle, pricing -- disciplined pricing is important. And to protect the affordability for consumers is really top of mind for us. And I think you saw that in Jason's -- not Jason's, in Andrew's presentation that 75% of our portfolio is still under $4, and we want to continue to drive that affordability.

Max Gumport with BNP Paribas. First, just on the conversation on '27. It sounds like a more balanced view of organic sales growth and also a nice outlook for organic sales growth of 2% to 4%. Can you talk about what's giving you the confidence in unit occasions, helping contribute to that growth?

Sure. I'll start, and Andrew or Stacy, feel free to jump in. We'll see the pivot on the balance on the top line evolve over the next couple of years. We'll start to see it in '27. We're going to see more of it in 2028. And so we'll start to see the seeds of that come through in '27, largely off the back of some of the things that we've talked about here in terms of new occasions, et cetera. But Stacy, or Andrew, do you want to add anything to that?

Yes, I can. I think there's a couple of things. So when I talked about that demand map, right? That enables us to really understand the drivers of choice. And every time someone is reaching for a snack and to position our portfolio to incrementally capture that. That comes to life in sort of the everyday moments that people are choosing snacks, and we will activate that through our pack strategy, through where our products are available and communications. And then these big moments, we -- Andrew talked about tentpoles, but having a full calendar of occasions that people can enjoy our products, not just seasons, but when they get together for other reasons as well. So having that plan and that discipline around how that portfolio works together around that gives us confidence.

Alexia Howard with Bernstein. I think there was a comment in the prepared remarks about more geographic expansion in Salty Snacks, and I think it's about the international markets. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Where are the opportunities? What kind of products? And then my second question is about Cocoa supply chain resiliency. I know you've alluded to that, but what more can you do to ensure that if weather patterns remain more volatile going forward?

Okay. Yes. So I'll take the first one with International Salty. Yes, we're starting with Canada. I think that's the close in, and we'll expand there. And then we'll look for other opportunities beyond that. Internationally, we're focused on confection markets that have scale, and that where our brands can be insurgent, and we can build that scale. And we have a track record of doing that. That's our first priority, going after those large markets like that. Jason, do you want to talk about cocoa?

Yes. When I think about cocoa, one of the things that I talked about was that there are more markets that are actually in and growing cocoa. So you're seeing volumes come out of those different places, like Ecuador, Brazil will increase. You're actually seeing it out of other countries in West Africa. So one of the core things that we're working on is how do we work on programs that help with the farmer and make sure that we keep farmers engaged over a longer term so that Hershey Income Accelerator program is really about making sure that we're engaging with them over the longer term so that they can have the right tool sets on good agricultural practices, what they're doing on their farms to make them more productive. And then we're also working on collaborations across the industry to actually make structural change in some of those markets as well. So you might have heard about together cocoa, which is a collaboration that we're doing with other brands to actually make structural changes to how we look at cocoa?

Rob Moskow, TD Cowen. A question for Jason. This will be an unusual year for volume sales for chocolate, probably high single-digit volume declines. You're making up for it and obviously, with dollars being up a lot. But how have you managed the supply chain through this kind of transition period. And you mentioned capacity expansion, has that been difficult to have volumes down while expanding capacity? And then what are you doing to plan for '27 and '28?

Yes. When I think about what we're seeing right now, we're actually seeing some of our conversions a little bit better than what we had expected. So as we're looking at that, we're making sure that we're staying ahead of where the actual consumption is, making sure we're bringing those insights back in through our planning processes and then making adjustments in our network.

I talked about opportunities to optimize as well. So there are times where we can either adjust how we apply shifts to certain lines or how we look at how we're bringing some of the, I would say, some of the things that we're doing around the planning for those lines. So we might take a line offline and run a more productive line during that time that we could have a better cost structure on. So those are the things that we're kind of managing around right now, but in most cases, right now, our plans are fully utilized.

Pete Galbo from BofA. Kirk, I wanted to ask about One Hershey and just the feedback you've gotten so far from both the retailers and maybe internally within the organization. Just was it a push from your end? Was it a pull from the retailers or salespeople? Just more background in the decision-making process and kind of how you land it there?

Yes. I mean a combination of both. When we talk to our customers, they want a partner that's easy to do business with, a partner that brings the very best insights and a partner that executes with excellence inside their stores. So I think that's really important. So when you talk to customers, they're asking for it, when you look internally, Andrew talked a little bit about this. So we've been building the capability for a while. So our SAP investment brought both businesses together. Our supply chain has been integrated across salty and sweet.

So this was the last step in doing this, and this is really playing to our strengths. Our strength is we have 1,100 sales reps out in those stores covering 75,000, going to 80,000 outlets and making a difference. And if they can make a difference across salty and sweet and especially as we're building these seasonal events and these tentpole moments, that all works in concert to drive growth. And it felt like this is the right time to do it. And we've communicated that with our customers, and we'll continue to work and refine that. But this is really playing to your strengths.

David Palmer, Evercore ISI. I would love to get a sense from you about the top line drivers and just how you think the things will play out in terms of the proportions of all the stuff that we saw today, there was a lot of things. There was activations, more frequent windows of activation, ACV opportunities for many of your top brands and pack type optimization and things you're doing working with retail and then you talked about other opportunities and many of which would be helpful in terms of your market share in chocolate. The premium chocolate area, we hear about Dubai chocolates and the like doing well, and those are things that maybe don't feel as near in. So like maybe you could give us a sense of how you think about the sequencing of all this stuff and the proportions of all this stuff.

Yes, that is a dynamic question. Thank you. Thinking about the landscape how do we start with where the core brands are growing. And Reese's and Hershey are doing exceptional. They're growing faster than the rest of our business right now. And that's supported by relevance. So you saw Stacy's campaign around Hershey. There's a new campaign around Reese's. There's innovation across Reese's, it's really working. You'll see innovation later this year. You'll taste the innovation this afternoon in the innovation breakout on Hershey. So when those two brands are working, I think that's a good place to start. And then you go into those places that are growing faster.

Sweets is one of them. So Jolly Rancher is delivering growth. There's also innovation coming out on Jolly Rancher. And so you think about the components of our portfolio working together our core, new growth spaces. You'll see some premium also in our -- with our R&D today, this afternoon, you're going to see that. We'll continue to grow that. And then our salty business. It's well outperformed, although it's relatively as an enterprise, it's small, but it's small but mighty. It's delivering upside growth. It's driving the growth for the salty category because it's really positioned in permissible snacking and the categories that are growing inside of salty.

So that adds fuel to the core and the confection spaces of growth. So that's a building block. Then our international business, we can gain share with the portfolio that we have that gives us some upside growth. And the last is an area that's going to be longer term is in this functional space. These are small brands, but they'll grow double digits this year, right? So that gives you a fuel. But I always start the story with our core. Then I look for innovation, our salty business, what's happening internationally, and then functional and then you have the growth landscape. But if your core is not doing well, it's a tough story, and we're doing very well with our core business.

Tom Palmer, JPMorgan. This question is probably going to be longer than I intended, but you're coming off the end of a multiyear cost savings plan, both productivity and AAA savings. It seems like there are still plans for productivity, but maybe not the same kind of cutting that we've seen over the last few years. One is maybe on the forefront once we get past this 3-year program, a new one worth introducing? And then second, as we think about productivity going forward, how much of it is kind of driven by the types of reductions we saw in the past versus maybe more AI-driven and technology-enabled?

Yes. I think -- I'll let Steve and Jason jump in. But productivity is a capability that the organization has done an exceptional job building in over the last several years and that capability from running more efficiently. And productivity is going to come from truly understanding demand and executing against that demand and that efficiency productivity is going to deliver a lot. But I'll let Steve and Jason, a little bit more about the future...

Yes, I will speak about macro, and maybe, Jason, you can talk supply chain. On the macro side, we don't have plans today to announce a new program. As exactly like Kirk said, this needs to be the muscle, everyday muscle. What's true though is the muscles are stronger today than they were two years ago before that program and one area is adjacent. The second thing is because more of it's technology enabled than it was in the past, kind of to your point on, there's more opportunity to lean into the AI and the technology tools than we had in the past too. So I'd say those are two differences. But Jason, do you want to just comment on the supply chain side of that?

Yes. One of the things that we've been investing in is making sure that we're able to get the data. The data is your critical asset and how you leverage technology and AI and the increased automation. So I actually think that the investments that we've had around S/4, around some of our planning systems and the technology have positioned us in a place where we can actually accelerate that through the use of automation and AI.

Steve Powers from Deutsche Bank. If we could go back to One Hershey, I guess the question is, do you have the organization and the incentive structure to deliver on One Hershey today? Do you need evolution there? Because it's going from a kind of a siloed structure and mentality. So one is more integrated. So just maybe comment around that.

You bet. Now Andrew has led the One Hershey integration, the thought leadership behind us. We'll let Andrew take that question.

Yes. I mean we obviously started with structure and that was an important one. I think a few points. One, our relative size, this isn't a new model for CPG, there's many CPGs that goes to a full portfolio. And the good news about us is I always think about it, like if you take front end, proteins at the front end, salty is at the front end, confections at the front end. We've got 6 to 10 brands there already, but we could easily have north of 12% to 15%, similar to displays and the like. So these things go together already. And then we follow the structure of our customers.

Largely, as you move up an organization with a customer, they're managing all of potentially all of total snacking or snack and beverage and where we saw a split inside of a customer, we would split from a structure perspective, but most importantly, we wanted the leadership of our -- of all of our teams, speaking about our total portfolio because that's who they're interacting with.

From an incentive perspective, over time, we'll get closer to it. I think we -- from a positive perspective, we were already in a One Hershey incentive model, largely driven by COVID in the past and other good reasons. This gives us a chance to move a little more into the business units, but the way we can track, and the way we can see it is very clear.

So regardless of how fast we move to say an incentive only on a salty or protein, we know the results in those disciplines immediately. So again, very natural for us. I mean, the last point I'd make to is again, customers would ask us, hey, look, if you're advising on the front end today, we need you to advise in the shape of your company. And the shape of your company is turning into salty leadership, protein leadership, I mean we agree with that. And I think that was my -- among all the other good reasons, that was my primary one for this is, listen to our customers and make a good choice.

Chris Carey, Wells Fargo. Steve, you made a comment, we'll be pushing for more where a show I don't tell it kind of company. I wonder if you could expand on that comment when you say pushing for more better in-market execution from a top line standpoint, better savings, better capture of the cocoa goodness. I wonder if I could just get some insight on that.

Yes. I guess what I'd say is we're never satisfied just saying, okay, hey, that's the algorithm. Let's just land the plane in the algorithm. We do start with the top and say, okay, what's the full put you kind of heard what's the whole potential of the business, segment by segment, okay? Then what's the full potential of what we can do on cost savings and productivity. And the full potential is not intended to be the full potential for this year like max it out and then cater the next year. The full potential is, okay, over a period of time. How do we extract the most from this business. And so as we set our long-term outlook, we're sitting in a place where we believe over time the business can consistently deliver, but we're never going to be satisfied unless we're trying to extract everything we can out of this business going forward. So again, I'm not trying to put a finer point on it than the long-term algorithm, but our incentive, our goal is to constantly be pushing for the full potential of the business performance.

Megan Clapp with Morgan Stanley. Just a question on confection, and it's a bit of a hypothetical theoretical question, if you will. But just given all the pricing you've taken, obviously, as margins recover, there will be a period where if we look at kind of profit per unit, it will be elevated versus probably anything you've seen historically. So just would love kind of your thoughts on how you think about the resilience of the portfolio through that transition period before we get to a bit more volume growth going forward.

Sure. Let me to take that one or you want to start, Andrew?

Sure. I'm happy to start. I think first on pricing, as I've learned at the company, the historical rate, if you start the cocoa commodity, like in the historical rate was 2,200 to 2,500 metric tons. So in the world we're in today, even with the return back to better pricing, it's still not at a historical level. So I'll start with the pricing we took was has shared many times. It was not net of commodity. In fact, a lot of credit to productivity and all the decisions made to not do that that quickly so you can protect the length of the brand.

So secondly, we didn't peanut butter spread. We did a very surgical look at pricing, and we thought about that by package, by type, and we're fortunate because we're flexible across a lot of packages and model. And then you've seen the category be pretty resilient. I think the competitors have been very rational. And our opportunity is we're also going to bring in pack types into different occasions that we haven't naturally been in, and I mentioned a few, especially in immediate consumption, snacking and protein, where they're white space for us.

So the restoration of pricing, I think my part personally is our pricing is in a good spot. Now the final piece is we'll always watch the market. And as a category leader in confection, being a category leader in our pricing is a natural return state, but if it isn't producing the balance we want, then we're fortunate to have levers in whether it's promotional depth frequency, innovation, pack type. And that's how we think about it. So at current state, I think we've been very responsible about how we've approached it. Again, we're not pricing net of our commodity costs, and then we're thinking about the long-term health of our brands.

Yes. Just say we got to earn it all the time. So the brand activation, the brand investment, the partnership, the tentpoles, we are not sitting back and placing prices in a positive spot. We are reinvesting to make this durable and sustainable, and again, come out stronger.

I look at where the category is today. It's one of the highest performing snacking categories, so it's performing very well. I think you have to look at the emotional nature of the category. This is a treat category. And then if you look at the durability and sustainability over a long period of time, how resilient has it been? Very resilient. And you say, well, there's something else going on. Pricing is a component, execution is a component. But this category delivers these moments and they're affordable moments. It's not an overwhelming amount of moment. So it's 40 calories a day basically for U.S. consumer. So it is in a sweet spot of a category that just brings that small uplift, and I think there's something to the sustainability of that.

Jim Salera with Stephens. I want to go back to Salty Snacks and talk about the opportunity there. Obviously, looking to be this #2 position in the category, that implies category growth from where we are today, from market share growth, I would hope can you break down mix of what you expect kind of embedded for Salty Snack category and then your brands on top of that? And maybe the volume mix component as we move forward on Salty Snacks, particularly as the largest player in that category has talked about maybe being more strategic on pricing and seeing some net price reductions this year.

Yes, I can take that, and Andrew can jump in as well. But when you look at the Salty Snack category and where our brands are positioned, they're positioned in permissible spaces, at least from the mindset of the consumer, higher growth. And then we have some disruptive brands. I would say Dot's has been disruptive in the Pretzel category, completely changing the face of the category and now becoming the #1 player. We see that momentum continuing. We see that we have opportunities build organically in the category. So new spaces in permissible snacking. So snacking is dynamic across multiple formats and multiple brands.

We see an opportunity to extend our brands into new places. We talked a little bit about dot snack mix. That will be a big thing. That is an approach. We'll also look for thoughtful M&A if that helps drive incremental growth. What I like about Salty is we're building something. And when you build something, you can be choiceful about those moves you make so that you stay in the most relevant consumer spaces.

Now price mix is also going to be important. We've been very patient, and we're in a different place than our competitor when it comes to price mix. We're in a really good place with a volume and consumption, and we still have so much runway for household penetration with these brands. That gives us so much excitement about what we're building. But I would say that encapsulates a lot of what -- how we're thinking about our salt business. Anything else to add?

I think you hit it. I mean, the average unit price for us in this has been very moderate and the ability to use price mix here given our relative size, especially in these smaller, if you will, pack sizes that get you to immediate consumption, gives you a good ballast against any price, but we've -- again, if you look at our brands, they've been very thoughtful and responsible because the goal is growth versus if we're sitting in a much bigger share growth area, but I think, this is another place where we'll do the same things that we do. This is a very thoughtful approach and moderate price mix together.

Scott Marks from Jefferies. During the presentation, you made a comment about the, I think it was the top 100 confection SKUs only being in 60% ACV currently with plans to reach 90%. Just wondering if you can help us understand maybe what was holding them back previously from reaching those levels? And what's changed now such that you can expand into the rest of those distribution points?

Yes, thanks for the question. Very simply, just a lot of customized sets in the world across channel, more so than you may see in any other category. So again, some other categories, if you look at a set, it doesn't differentiate so much between the drug channel, the convenience retail, and meeting convenience retail small format, but large store grocery mass. Ours just had a lot -- just a lot more differentiation. And again, these are also -- these SKUs produced. But when we really looked at the number of SKUs doing the highest portion of your revenue, that customization just didn't give you the ACV scale that you might see in others. It's really somewhat that simple. .

And then we also just our shopper studies and consumer studies say bring some conformity to the aisle, make it a bit easier for me to approach this category, and I'm going to participate more. So those are the two reasons that we think we can get that to a much better ACV rate. And then we'll move on to the next 100 and the next 100 and just get a better scale. It's not about less SKUs in the sense of, it's keep the SKUs that produce for occasions, produce good revenue, that's what we want on the shelf. And let's not necessarily fill it over time, with things that might have been just a customization for the category.

Peter Grom from UBS. So I had a question on category growth. There was a slide that talked about U.S. snacking growth. I think it showed pre-COVID 3%. You outlined an expectation for 2% to 3%, call it, '25 in the next couple of years? And then going back to 3% plus in '28. So I know you touched on some of the drivers, but can you just outline or share your level of confidence that growth will reaccelerate? And then I guess, as you look across the various subcategories, is that reacceleration broad-based? Or is that concentrated into just a few?

Yes. The resilience of this category has been over a long period of time, and the fundamentals, I think, are in place. With core growth, we look at the business where the category is healthy. How do we make our contribution to the category fuel the growth. So we think of two things of how do we get our big brands working with consumers and our retailers. So that's job #1. So we'll have to invest modern brand building, things like that. Innovation, as you've seen, is a big driver in this category.

So innovation will play -- continue to play a role. It's another area that we're investing in, in our R&D. We have room to get better. And you'll see some of it today in our R&D session. You'll see some of the thinking around how we go into sweets, what our look in premium, how accessible premium looks, and how we elevate our brands, all that drives the growth. I feel really good. If I look at the history of the category and its performance and then I look at how dynamic the situation is today, I see a lot of promise for where brands are resonating with consumers and where innovation is coming through. The combination of those two things keep the category very vibrant over time.

We have time for 1 last question. We got Leah.

Leah Jordan, Goldman Sachs. I just wanted to follow up on the premium comments you guys have made today and just in the last question as well. Some of that may come from M&A, but just if you can provide more detail on the opportunities to go more premium within your existing portfolio? And then how do you think about balancing the extension of the brand, making distinct products, but also keeping the brand cohesive and have its core qualities? And then finally, just any thoughts about potential cannibalization as you kind of further extend these brands as well?

Yes, this is a great question for Stacy.

I love it. Yes, we see it in a few areas. So across the whole breadth of the portfolio, we do have a good position in premium. We've talked about salty. But for chocolate in particular, which is what I spent most of the time talking about, we see a few different areas. One, we do see opportunities for premium in our core brands. So for Hershey's this afternoon, some of you are going to experience the innovation. We're bringing more cream filled bars. We're bringing more truffles.

You're going to start to see how we elevate the brand, and as we brought those through things like Velocity Labs and limited partnerships, there's a lot of demand intake for those brands and they're willing to pay a premium. We still want to anchor in the promise of Hershey's and that little bit of happiness, but a little bit more of an elevated experience with an accessible brand is something that consumers are looking for. So we see opportunity there.

We also have premium brands that we're going to invest in, in a way that we haven't in the past. In the U.S., the Cadbury brand has actually perceived its quite premium. And we have opportunity through innovation, media, distribution on that brand. Same with Brookside. That brand has a lot of momentum. And with additional investment and pack types, we think we can see room there well. And then finally, we are innovating, and we will have some new branded propositions. I mentioned Gen Z a lot. There actually aren't a lot of great premium chocolate brands that focus on indulgence, quality ingredients for that consumer. And so you're going to see some innovation from us in that area as well.

Great. So before we conclude the broadcast, I'd like to turn it back to Kirk for some closing remarks. Kirk?

Yes. Thank you. Thank you for your engagement today. I really appreciate what you bought. You brought a good energy, lots of great questions. And it's an important time for us. This is about the next chapter of growth. But before we close, I want to leave you with a few points on how we're thinking about the road ahead, how we are winning as the NextGeneration snacking company.

At our core, we are a company with a very clear identity. We know where we should lead, where -- we know where we can lead. And just as importantly, we know where we should not play. That clarity allows us to focus our resources where they matter most and drive consistent, high-quality growth. What gives us confidence isn't a single initiative. It's the combination of momentum across our categories, strength of our brands and the discipline we bring to execution.

We're building on a position of leadership, while also expanding into the spaces where we see real durable opportunity. You heard throughout the day, we were evolving to become even faster, more integrated, more capable as an organization. And that's showing up in how we innovate how we out market, out execute and how we connect with consumers. And it is supported by a supply chain and that is not just an enabler, but a competitive advantage.

At the same time, we are managing the business with a clear eye on value creation. We're balancing near-term performance with the investments required to sustain growth over the long term. Now that discipline is what we believe will drive stronger returns and greater resilience over time. And we're excited about what's ahead, and we're confident in our ability to execute. We are balancing revenue and growth with investment in the future. In 2027, we talked about recovering our earnings and then '28, taking our growth even further.

Hershey is a strong performance-minded company. This is a company that is focused, that is evolving and that is positioned to out-deliver. So thank you for your time, your engagement and your continued interest in Hershey. We're going to break and take you to our breakout sessions. Please enjoy those and engage with us, and we'll have further conversations later today. Thank you so much.

So we will now move into our breakout sessions, where you'll hear from members of our Hershey team on topics, including branding, commercial capabilities and innovation in R&D to bring to life a lot of what you've heard from us over the course of the afternoon. So each of you, if you turn over your badge, you'll see a brand logo on the back of the name badge. Please follow the signage in back of the room with the corresponding image on the back of your badge to go to your next designated breakout room and we'll rotate through the three sessions.

Greetings, and welcome to the Hershey Company Fourth Quarter 2025 question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I'd now like to turn the call over to your host, Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations for The Hershey Company. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for The Hershey Company's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Q&A session. I hope everyone has had the chance to read our press release and listen to our prerecorded management remarks both of which are available on our website. In addition, we have posted a transcript of the prerecorded remarks. At the conclusion of today's live Q&A session, we will also post a transcript and audio replay of this call.

Please note that during today's Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release and the company's SEC filings.

Finally, please note that we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide useful information for investors. This information is not intended to be considered in isolation, or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations for the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release.

Joining me today are Hershey's President and CEO, Kirk Tanner; and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil.

I will now invite Kirk to begin with a brief introduction.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Before we get to questions, I just want to recognize our team and what they accomplished in 2025. Through skillful execution we strengthened our market position, we invested for the future, and we closed out the year with real momentum, all while navigating serious headwinds like cocoa inflation and macro volatility. Heading into 2026, I am confident. Our portfolio is resilient. We're looking at 4% to 5% net sales growth and meaningful earnings recovery. And that gives us runway to invest in innovation, brand building and execution to drive growth, and we are going after it.

Thanks for attending the call today, and we're ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Andrew Lazar with Barclays.

Maybe to start, I appreciate obviously the [indiscernible] category is typically not one that is a pass-through category, and that Hershey and others are still hedged well above where current spot rates are for cocoa at this point. But I guess just given the precipitous recent decline in the commodity, I guess, is there a risk maybe this time around that we could see some price deflation at some point, by either Hershey or competitors to sort of better match go-forward cocoa costs? And, I guess, how do you account for that sort of possibility in the guidance?

Yes. Thank you for the question. our competitors in the category are sophisticated, and they're large like ourselves, and they likely have coverage for more certainty in their business. And private label remains small here in the U.S. So that's kind of the first point. But there's a big conversation around how we think about pricing and the price of cocoa, et cetera. I'd like to make a few points here.

So first, we don't take pricing lightly, and we've been very patient and played the long game when cocoa market searched to balance consumer needs. Our actions that we've taken are anchored in consumer insights and the brands remain affordable and accessible. 75% of our portfolio is still under $4. The pricing we took in '25, I think this is important, does not fully cover our cocoa cost inflation in 2026. So we are on a recovery path while also adding significant fuel to our growth with investments in marketing, innovation, R&D, really to keep that momentum on the top line going, and keeping the category exciting for consumers and keep that growth moving into '26 -- or beyond '26, into '27, '28.

And then recently, pricing on our snacks business, I think we're in really good shape. We had 18% growth on our snack business in Q4 on double-digit volume growth. Let me get a drink. Sorry, Andrew.

Yes. So -- yes, that's kind of in a broad response to what we see in the market. Certainly, the deflationary momentum on cocoa takes future pricing pressure down. That's how I think about it.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just a follow-up. I guess regarding elasticity, it's great to see that it's thus far coming in more favorably than you anticipated. I guess I'm curious as to what maybe do you owe this better outcome? And is the company building in some flexibility in the plan, should elasticity increase as we've seen maybe in some other markets for some other players?

Yes, let me start and I'll kick it over to Steve, so that -- I think his voice might be stronger, right. Anyway, look, we're encouraged for what we've seen so far. So we announced pricing in July. We started taking pricing mid-September. And so we've gotten information that it's informed and our information is informed on what we're seeing right now, and we're encouraged by what we're seeing right now.

Yes. And I would say elasticities don't stay static. It fluctuates over time. While we're experiencing elasticities right now that's favorable to our original outlook, we continue to plan for around [ 0.8 ] to account for these fluctuations as there's still some price pack changes to roll in. There are still some channels rolling shelf tags through. So it's going to take a little bit longer, I think, for everything to fully adjust.

Of course, our goal is to do better than that. So with the strong activation calendar that we have, some of the investment that we have, our goal is to do better, but the guide allows for some of that upside to flow through.

Our next question comes from the line of Megan Clapp with Morgan Stanley.

I'll maybe start with a question for Steve to give Kirk, maybe give you a little bit of a break. So another question on cocoa, but more related to the margin framework. So I think in the prepared remarks, you talked about stable rates across the broader, commodity input basket. Just given the [ percivitous ] decline we've seen in cocoa, how should we think about cocoa within the framework? Were you able to kind of capture any benefit from what we've seen over the last month? Or is this really a tailwind as we think about '27?

And what I'm really just trying to get at is, I think you're implying 41% gross margins and '26, obviously, a really nice recovery from '25, but still well below where you've been historically. So based on where cocoa's gone, is it kind of reasonable to expect continued progress kind of back towards those historical gross margin levels in '27?

Yes, happy to take it. We're glad to see that the cocoa financial markets have finally begun to reflect some of the fundamentals that we've been describing really for the last 18 months. As we look out, we continue to anticipate a larger supply surplus in '25 and '26, driven by supply expansion in some of those new origins we've talked about, as well as a contraction in global demand. So I'd say we're optimistic as we look to the future.

That said, there's market volatility still, as prices are trying to find that new equilibrium. And I think we still believe that new equilibrium is likely to be above what we've seen in historic levels. Our hedging program has in great shape for 2026, and we're hedged above current market levels. So if you kind of extend current market levels flat, that would suggest that we still have some upside for further deflation in 2027. So we'll talk more about that as we give more 2027 and '28 perspective at the conference. But as we look ahead, we see more possibility for upside there in the future.

Okay. Great. And maybe kind of a related question. A lot of discussion in the prepared remarks about the increased brand investment you're doing in 2026, including a double-digit increase in advertising. So as you look out to '27, how should we think about kind of the durability of the increased brand investments you're making in '26? And as you mentioned, as gross margins hopefully kind of continue to expand as cocoa deflates, how do you think about kind of the need or desire for incremental reinvestment beyond what you're doing in '26?

Sure. I mean, I think I would think about the things we're doing in '26 are, in some cases, multiyear investments, that are going to lay a foundation for not just '26, but '27 and beyond, while still delivering great growth in the present. We're really focused on fueling demand creation through things like scaling some investments in R&D and innovation, brand building, the retail sales team and the technology around that. That sets the portfolio up and really focuses on household penetration expansion and capturing new consumers, recapturing some of our lapsed consumers.

So -- so the investments are a mix of things they're going to deliver today, but also things that are laying a foundation, a multiyear foundation. And again, as we look to '27, '27 is also going to be a year like '26 of driving growth, but also margin recovery. So that balance will be present in '27 just like it is in '26.

Yes. We'll go into greater detail at our investor conference in March. Really unpacked this brand building, our investments in R&D. The solution here is to have sustainable long-term top line growth. And those capabilities and investments that we make are really important and we'll unpack that in March.

Our next question comes from the line of Peter Galbo with Bank of America.

Steve, I actually was hoping maybe we could unpack the quarter a little bit. You had some pretty nice upside in the gross margin, I think, even relative to your own expectations to the tune of like 250 basis points plus. I know you outlined maybe some of that in the prepared remarks of the buckets. But maybe you could just give us a little bit more detail on the upside in the quarter between kind of tariff cost saving, volume deleverage, where those kind of buckets stood?

Sure. Yes. You're right. We had a few hundred basis points of better performance in gross margin than we expected in the fourth quarter. And there are a couple of things in there. Obviously, volumes were strong. So we got a little bit more leverage. But probably the single biggest piece was tariffs.

Now if you think about tariffs in two ways. Tariffs on our products, which we have high visibility to, and we'll talk about that as some of that is still sitting in inventory to come out in Q1. But we also pay tariffs on some of our suppliers' items. And that was an area where we anticipated paying more tariffs on some of our suppliers' materials then we ended up paying in the fourth quarter. And that was one of the, I'll say, surprises to the upside or the positive for the quarter.

Offsetting that, we had a little bit of [indiscernible] headwinds, inventory [indiscernible] headwinds, but that was the biggest piece for the upside.

Got it. Okay. And Kirk, the prepared remarks had a notable on kind of Hershey and [ Reese's ] having a true campaign for the first time in 8 years. I was commenting to Anoori this morning, like I've seen the team USA at, it's great ad copy. But just like the impetus kind of for why now, why this, why now on both those brands, again, given it's been some time would be helpful?

Yes. Thanks for that question. This is the year [ of ] Hershey, and we're investing in [indiscernible] as well. But -- when you look at the campaign, it's your happy place with Hershey's. That really builds on the connection and love that consumers have for the brand. And staying relevant with consumers on big brands is so important to fuel our growth.

We've got a full year planned on both [ Reese's ] and Hershey. You'll see innovation on both. There's big innovation coming out on Hershey. And then of course, we have the movie celebrating [ Milton ] Hershey and really the great American story success story of the Hershey Company coming out in the fall. So it really is an action-packed year that really celebrates these two big brands, and that drives growth for us.

Our next question comes from the line of Peter Grom with UBS.

I wanted to ask on the '26 guidance and understanding a lot has changed over the last few months as it relates to cocoa, tariffs, elasticities. But I kind of wanted to bridge from the expectation last quarter being on algorithms to maybe being a little bit above that, post tariffs to now kind of expecting 30% to 35% earnings growth? And I ask that more in context of trying to understand degree of cushion, or flexibility in the guidance just given the expectation for such strong growth?

Yes. Let me address just the momentum on the top line and let Steve talk about the EPS portion. But if you think about what's different between now and when we talked last, is the momentum in the business, and it's across the portfolio. So we've got real strength in our CNG business and continue to see that. And then fundamentally, how we're investing in our brands and delivering innovation, that gives us the confidence on the top line. And then our Salty portfolio has been really -- got a lot of tailwind. It's really positioned with consumers in the right places.

Again, we saw 18% growth on -- organic growth in quarter 4 in our Salty business. And that's double-digit volume growth. So we see real help there. And the combination of our Salty and Sweet portfolio gives us the confidence to deliver the top line, which also, of course, helps our earnings. So that's different.

And then on EPS, Steve can talk, and that's through the levers there.

Sure. We're -- it's a good spot to be in for a change where we have two of our biggest risk, cocoa and tariffs fully understood, at least up to the moment for the year. So that's a good place to start.

On top of that, since we last talked, we've got a better view. We get new data every day on elasticity, we feel better about what we're seeing. We haven't, as we said earlier, [indiscernible] build all that potential upside into the plan, but we -- we believe we've got a good balanced outlook on elasticities. We've got strong operating plans that Kirk and I have been through in detail in the last few months, and we're excited about those. And at the same time, we're balancing that with understanding the headwinds from the macros and making sure that we've got a balanced view of how those could play out for the year.

As we think about the gives and takes that we sometimes focus on what's in our control, and what's outside our control in our control, as we said earlier, we want to do better on elasticities. And we've got strong programming and brand engagement to do that. We've got investments in innovation, media, in-store activation. And then the ability, which we've done a great job of delivering on productivity and cost savings. So we've got very high confidence in that set of controllables.

But there are things out of our control, macro headwinds, which, again, I believe we've got a prudent outlook for competitive response. Again, we're not seeing anything today that's causing concern, but these are the things that we will certainly keep an eye on. I think a key as we think about the '26 guidance, that we have flexibility to respond to what's going to change and challenge. And so we've done a good job of being agile in '25, and we will do the same in 2026.

Great. And then maybe just a follow-up on Salty. There was a competitor this week that talked about affordability, price reductions that they're seeing expanded shelf-based distribution. I know there's some subcategory differences. But just curious how you see that playing out for the category and maybe any implications for your business as well?

Yes. Our Salty business has got a lot of momentum, like we talked about, 18% double-digit growth for the full year, and really healthy volume growth. Customers reward space on performance and velocity. That's the fundamentals of the category management. And so we are -- as well, we're expanding with our customers and customers need our growth.

If you think about the category, the Salty category was relatively flat last year, and we grew double digits. So we provided a lot of growth in the category, and we'll continue to do that with our customers, and we'll be rewarded with space gains and addition -- including support for the innovation that we bring out on our Salty business. So I feel really good about the fundamentals of where we are with our Salty business, and that momentum will continue.

Our next question comes from the line of David Palmer with Evercore ISI.

I want to hit on that line of questioning you heard earlier. People right now are going to be wrestling with how to think about earnings into '27, which is ridiculously early. I know but people are going to clearly be imagining $10 or more in earnings in '27. Just thinking through where cocoa is today and likely it could be in the [ 4,000s ] for that upcoming year just based on how you might be hedging this year into that year.

I'm just wondering like things that would maybe not make -- we don't want to get ahead of ourselves in terms of flow through, things that could hold back that flow through to get to those types of numbers, price elasticity moving over [ 0.8 ], I would imagine would be one. But other wish list types of reinvestments? Any thoughts on that would be helpful. And I have a follow-up.

Sure. As you said, we'll unpack this more in the Investor Day. I agree with you. I think we all agree the external factors as we look out seem to be improving. Cocoa, one of those, we'd agree that today, if you were to [indiscernible], you'd probably say that looks like a potential tailwind for 2027. But it's still volatile. It still hasn't found its new normal, and we continue to watch it.

On the other side, we are going to, as we said earlier, continue to make investments in the portfolio and products that are going to set us up for multiyear performance. And so we feel good about what we have in the 2026 plan. Some of those are going to carry over into 2027. We are always going to balance the margin recovery and the growth. So don't think about that investment has taken away that margin recovery. But it's a balancing factor to make sure we enable long-term growth.

And then as we talked about earlier, we're going to watch those macros very closely. We'll get more data on [ SNAP ]. We've got a lot of data coming in on GLP-1s, just like many [ of you do ], we have a team of people who does nothing but study and analyze these macros to understand the impact on our business. And so we have built in, what we believe is, the best information today into that guide, but that will be a place we'll watch as it develops over the course of this year and we get more data.

And just -- I don't want to front run your Investor Day. But Kirk, you obviously have been in the CPG space for a while. You have fresh eyes on this business. You obviously have a chance to -- do you have a say in the plan for '26 and '27, in terms of how we should think about the type of growth activations and the things that you're doing? The levers that we will see more of perhaps than that we've seen in the recent past. Any thoughts on that, just tease the Analyst Day a bit.

Yes, let's tease it out. But hey, look, first of all, we'd love to see you all on March 31 in New York. We're excited to share that. I'm excited to share the plan.

So 2026 is really the first chapter of our next generation of growth. And then really -- and what we'll kind of share with you is the portfolio that we're building, the -- look, we have a terrific portfolio today. We'll continue to invest in that portfolio, and we're going to double down on our strengths. And those strengths will fuel that top line growth while we return earnings to our shareholders, and we'll bring that to life in -- at the Investor Day. And we'll be very articulate about what investments we're making, what capabilities and what outcomes we expect, but you'll see that really come to life. We're really excited to share that with you.

Our next question comes from the line of Leah Jordan with Goldman Sachs.

There just seems to be a lot of attention and excitement about the innovation and activation plans in a lot of your commentary today. So seeing if you could provide more color on the plans you have for the coming year, key timing we should think about? And then I think ultimately, how do you think about growth and innovation versus core for the coming year?

Yes. I think it's a balance. We just talked about some of the investments we're making on Hershey's and [ Reese's ]. I think that quality core growth is really important. And there's innovation in those places as well. But innovation is so important to the category, and we've had some really good innovation as of late. [indiscernible] has been a really nice tailwind for us, and that continues through most of this year where we have -- 2/3 of the year we'll have that being a real positive to us.

And then we have a pipeline of innovation that we're launching across our sweets and chocolate portfolio that we're excited. Plus we have really good innovation on our Salty business. And so innovation on our Hershey brand, Dot's brand, SkinnyPop, JOLLY RANCHER, you'll see all that innovation. We'll share all that innovation and our upcoming Investor Day, but it is robust.

And then if you think about '27 and beyond, it's important that we have a pipeline of innovation that continues through '27. And that's why we're making continued investments in R&D so that we can be it -- come to the market faster with the most relevant consumer-facing ideas, and we'll share that pipeline as well.

Okay. Great. We'll look forward to that. I think for my follow-up, I just wanted to go back to the gross margin discussion, specifically around this year and the cadence. Thank you for the color on the 400 basis points, we should expect for the full year a little bit of pressure in 1Q and improve thereafter. But any more color on the puts and takes we should think about in the magnitude of that improvement as we go through each quarter?

Sure. You bet. I can take that one. As we kind of look through the flow of the quarters, we're going to see -- the first half is going to be -- or excuse me, Q1 will be the strongest from a top line standpoint. We're going to carry the momentum out of the fourth quarter, feel really good about our visibility in the first quarter on the top line. But margin and earnings are going to remain under pressure because we still are going to have higher cost inventory. We're still going to have tariffs in that inventory. So we'll see margin and earnings pressure in Q1.

As we go to Q2, the top line growth is going to moderate slightly, but you're going to see an inflection from a gross margin standpoint. And we expect to see double-digit EPS growth for the balance of the year from there. Of course, we know we got tougher comps in the second half, but we factored that in as we think about this flow.

So think about momentum carrying through the first half on the top line, second quarter inflection from a profitability standpoint. And then we'd expect to see our brand investment up double digits across the quarters, and this reflects some of those investments we talked about earlier.

Our next question comes from the line of Max Gumport with BNP Paribas.

Clearly, elasticity so far been encouraging. And I'm not expressing my own view here, but one that you hear from some investors. I think there's a narrative out there that once you get through this pricing cycle you'll be unable to grow your chocolate volumes for several years. It's similar to what we're seeing in other packaged food categories currently. I realize we're a long way away from that point in time. But I'm just curious what pushback you'd offer to that narrative? And if there's any historical presence you're focused on?

Yes. Let me break it down. Look, we like where we're at with really the big categories across our Confection business and our Salty business. The Confection category has been very resilient over time and it remains resilient. It is an emotional category that consumers look for. And if you think about where the growth is right now in retail, it really is around functional and emotional brands. And so that gives you confidence to see that continue to grow.

And if it just look historically, it's been a very resilient category, it's a really good category. On the Salty side of the business, I think it's really important to be in the right places in the category. Permissible, better-for-you, portion control. Those are areas that continue to leverage growth. Consumers are willing to pay for that. That's where the growth is, and that's where our brands are positioned in the category. Give you a couple of examples.

SkinnyPop is doing exceptionally well. It's a real relevant, popcorn very relevant with consumers today and will be long term as we see those consumer trends and what they're looking for. Dot's Pretzels really shows how you can reinvent a category and drive growth. Dot's is now the #1 pretzel in the category. And it is about tying into the relevance of what consumers are looking for. That -- of course, you're going to hear more about kind of the long term at -- and I'm really plugging this Investor Day. So I hope you're off coming. But we'll walk through kind of the long-term plan and how we see the categories and how we see the sustainability of that over the long-term horizon.

And I think we'll have an opportunity there, too, to talk about how we can play offense on some of the categories that are going to see more growth. So we know sweets, better-for-you. Premium, some of the functional products that we're going to talk about, I think we're going to have a really good story about how they can lean into the volume story as well.

Great. And then in Europe, where I realize you don't have much of a chocolate presence, but it's a market where we an interesting corollary because in Europe, we saw chocolate pricing get taken earlier in a sizable way. And initially, [indiscernible] were quite encouraging as you're seeing in the U.S. currently for your own chocolate business. But in the middle of '25, we started to see pricing fees ramp up meaningfully in Europe ahead of where the industry expected them to be. So I'm sure you're studying consumer behavior over there even if you [indiscernible] much of a presence.

I'm curious what your learnings that you've taken? And if there's any factors you're seeing that make the consumer in Europe, and how they approach chocolate different from the U.S. consumer?

Yes. Thanks for that question. Yes, and we are definitely studying that. Look, we've taken a very patient approach as we've -- the impact of cocoa and the pricing. So we've taken a very patient approach through the lens of the consumer. The categories, though, in the U.S. look very different than Europe. There's more brand differentiation. If you look at the brands across the portfolio, there's a lot high level of differentiation. There's a variety across the portfolio. And the top players have higher market share.

Europe has a concentration of chocolate tablet bars and private label. But there is a very distinguished difference between the brands in the U.S. and the role of each of those brands play in the confection category. So there is a big difference. And the category skews premium in Europe, and SKUs mainstream in the U.S. Relative affordability is still a key component of the category. Again, we mentioned that 75% of our portfolio is under $4, very accessible to consumers.

Our next question comes from the line of Jim Salera with Stephens Inc.

I wanted to ask a little bit around [ SNAP ] as we roll into '26, there's some incremental rule changes, I think, both on work requirements and some states restricting what you can buy with SNAP dollars. Just walk us through, I guess, first, the overall percentage of your portfolio that is exposed to snack dollars? And maybe how you're thinking about those changes in 2026, since they're all relatively new to the program?

Yes. Thanks, Jim. This, SNAP. Let me just give you what we know on SNAP and how we're seeing it. Look, our early assessment in the states where waivers are in place is still pretty noisy. It's been just since January, and we're looking at winter storm implications. And really, the difference across retailers as they implement it. We've proactively spending time with customers and consumers in these states to get ahead of the choices they're making. And we are readying our strategies to deliver for them.

We have factored the SNAP waiver adoption into our outlook, and we'll continue to monitor that and provide updates over the course of the year. So to date, only 2 states have implemented SNAP waivers for candy of the 12 states that have waivers approved. So in total, throughout the course of the year, there will be 12 states that are impacted, 2 states so far. We'll gather those insights. Again, it's pretty early days. But I would tell you, it's a manageable headwind and it's contemplated in our outlook.

Great. And then shifting gears a little bit. You called out the 10 different cultural and seasonal events this year to boost engagement. Are you able to quantify how much of an incremental uplift we should see from kind of that more filled calendar relative to what like a normalized year would be?

Yes, I think it looks -- if you kind of look at our outlook, it's reflected in that outlook. Look, it continues to make our top line robust. And because some of the kind of the background on this is we have excellence in executing seasons. So we gained share across the seasons last year. What makes it so great is we have the consumer-loved brands, coupled with great execution in the marketplace with our retail sales team. This gave us insight is like we have the opportunity to be a part of more cultural moments and the Olympics starting this weekend, is really the first of those.

But we'll show up for NCAA Final 4, and will show up in the summer, celebrating 250-year anniversary of our country. Our brands are expected by consumers to show up in these big cultural moments and connecting our brands to these cultural moments gives us the license to have more activity throughout the year in these cultural moments in addition to seasons. And it has this almost always on approach where you can see our brands, our Salty jour Sweet brands together in the marketplace celebrating these moments. And kind of that's the background of that.

Our next question comes from the line of Tom Palmer with JPMorgan.

You discussed plans for double-digit [ A&C ] increases? And then unless I missed it, your answer to Andrew suggests that your pricing plans, some of which have not rolled out still hold I did want to ask on promotions. How do you consider the possibility of stepped up promotions later this year, and maybe balancing the optionality of promotions versus allocating towards marketing dollars?

Yes. So let me ask -- let me answer the advertising and the investment we're making there. So we got great programming around building our big brands like we talked about, Hershey and [indiscernible]. Plus we have these programs, these cultural tent-pole moments that we will support throughout the course of the year. It is a balance of delivering pull and push. So you think about that demand creation, we're very cognizant and we have great return on these investments to deliver that, and that delivers the top line.

And then from an execution standpoint, I would tell you that the category remains very rational from a pricing standpoint. We'll continue to leverage promotion to drive excitement with consumers and deliver that right price point for them. And we'll be in concert with the execution across our seasons in these tent-pole moments throughout the year. But I would expect overall, a very rational category.

Yes. And I would just say on the first part of your question, just to be clear, all the pricing has been sold in. So that's not a risk. There's nothing else pricing-wise, that's going to drop.

In the prepared remarks, there was a comment about expected low single-digit sales growth for international. I wondered if maybe you could provide some color on expectations in the other 2 segments? And then also, there was a comment about profit recovery for international. And I wondered to what extent that might reflect incremental pricing actions because they were relatively modest as we look at 2025?

Sure. I can take maybe the segment piece first. So just to share a couple of headlines. So organic sales growth on the confection segment, around 3%. Salty snacks, mid-single digits, international down low single digits. So that's the organic top line.

From an EBIT standpoint, we've got all double digit across the segments year-over-year. So that's some of the highlights on the segments.

On international, we've taken a lot of price this year, and that's part of what we're seeing in terms of some of the volume impact from that. We play in the premium part of the market. We've got cocoa intensive products. And so we've been, in some cases, stronger on pricing in order to make sure we're setting up a good, strong future P&L. We've been very thoughtful about trying to focus on the markets where we believe we have the best case to win, and making some choices on go to market to that, again, are thinking about the future and the profitability.

Despite the challenges, we've had some wins in the international market. And we'll talk about some of those and how we're expanding on those when we get to March. But we do have a mix of, sort of, recovering for cocoa pricing and then also optimizing the portfolio itself to make sure that as we look to the future, we're investing behind our big brand like [indiscernible] and also our core markets with a streamlined route to market.

Yes. Let me add on a couple of things on international. Look, I'm really bullish on the opportunity that we have internationally. I look at our track record right now just from how we're performing in the markets, our key markets, and we're gaining share, gaining share across Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., I think those are really important proof points that we have the opportunity to do that. We're going to bring a focused strategy on our international business in March that really articulates how we're going to make investments and why we have a right to win in these markets. But more to come.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Lavery with Piper Sandler.

I want to come back to guidance. I know you laid out some of the flexibility, or ways, that you're trying to allow for risks and capture those. But curious, not to get too greedy, if there's expectations where you can point to potential upside? And maybe also specifically how to think about buybacks? I know you said there weren't any in the last quarter, but you mentioned the authorization that remains. Are any of those included in the outlook for 2026?

Sure. So I'll come on to buybacks. On the upside, we touched on some of these already. I mean it's elasticities were to hold in the sort of space they're in now, that would be a potential upside. Even the macros, although our outlook is to expect the macros like SNAP and GLP-1 to have a growing impact across the quarters, which I think is reasonable. If that is slower or less impact, I think that's upside to what we've tried to prudently build into the outlook. Things like the performance on innovation, media, all these in-store activations and [indiscernible] that we've talked about. Again, our goal is to execute all those to try to beat the plan, but those would be potential upside. And then as always, we want to exceed our productivity and cost savings goals.

So we've got, what I think are good challenging objectives there to go get, but our supply chain teams are fantastic, and they're going to go hard against trying to beat those. So I think those are all the kind of things we would point to. When I look at it in total, I feel like as we look at the guide, it's balanced. We're trying to recognize there are upsides and opportunities to beat in some areas, but also there are still some unknowns that we want to make sure we can contend with. And that's where the agility piece comes in.

On buybacks, I'll just maybe just say our capital allocation strategy is kind of resetting back to normal a little bit. And so without some of the pressure, cash pressure in particular on tariffs and cocoa. And so as you can tell from the guide, our focus in job one is to make sure we're funding the business and driving good, smart long-term investment in the organic business. Maintaining a posture of agility relative to inorganic growth opportunities, and we're integrating [indiscernible], that's going very well. We're going to continue to look for those sort of opportunistic places.

You see CapEx kind of normalizing again back into the space where it should be. You see us focused on working capital efficiency like we are every year driving savings, dividend returning to growth, which is very important to us and pleased to see that. and we feel good about leverage and where we're at in the trajectory on leverage. So all that kind of comes then down to the repurchase. And as we've said in the past, share repurchase is a great way to put tension in the capital allocation equation, right? We're not going to warehouse the shareholders' money if we can't wisely invest it for the future, we're going to give it back. And so that conversation is now back on the table because we're going to have strong cash flow. We've got great investments supporting the business. And as the year progresses and we get a little bit more perspective on some of these macros and everything else, we'll reintroduce that conversation.

That's great color. And it sounds like you might be having an Investor Day soon, but -- and I'm sure you'll get into this in obviously much more detail. But as you lay out some of the investment opportunities and the reinvestments you're making this year, just at a high level, maybe can you give us a sense of how much we should expect a near-term impact versus longer term? And how that kind of fits into your thinking?

Yes, I'm going to punt the details of that [indiscernible] investors. What I would say is all of these investments have something to do for us now and are going to have things to do for us for the future. You can imagine investments in R&D. The near term on R&D investment may not be as big as we're going to see in '27 and '28. But even so we'll get some early insights from that. And so we'll unpack that more. But think of these as multiyear investments, but they do have benefits even as we get to especially the back end of this year.

Yes. Let me just add. These investments are all about driving growth, top line growth, sustainable growth, modernizing our portfolio. So those are fundamentally what's backing this growth is to fuel and keep heat on our brands with consumers, launch innovations that are relevant and do the R&D so that we can continue to modernize our portfolio for the future and staying relevant is so important. So it really is about fueling growth.

Our next question comes from the line of Alexia Howard with Bernstein.

Can I start with the price elasticity in international markets versus the U.S. Do you have views on why the trends seem to be worse in the international markets, and why they're better over here at the moment?

Yes. Yes, let me take that question. We discussed a little bit, there's a big difference between the two categories for starters. The category in the U.S. is highly unique. The category is very differentiated across the portfolio. There's a lot of runway by brand across the landscape in the confection category in the U.S. versus a high chocolate tablet bar market in Europe, along with the impact of private label.

So you think about affordability, also is a real big lever. And the category is affordable. It skews mainstream. Our portfolio is still mostly under $4. That, I think, is a really big difference. But the resiliency has been really positive for the category here in the U.S. And what we've seen so far, we're encouraged by.

I would say, specific to our portfolio in international elasticities, keeping in mind, we are premium market positioning. So we see some more elasticity there. We're relatively limited in scale in some regions. And not a market leader. So those are factors with our portfolio, in particular, that drive higher elasticity.

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Smith with Stifel.

Steve, you called out an increase in both marketing and operating costs through the year. It sounds like marketing up double digits is fairly evenly phased. But is there anything unique you'd call out on the operating costs? And with operating costs growing in line with sales, is this a level of investment that as you exit 2026, allows some future leverage from SG&A?

Sure. So I think across the quarters, I would guide to say it's probably going to be pretty even. There are going to be some -- and again, I'll go back to things like R&D, [indiscernible] build a little bit more in the back half. And we'll unpack that more when we get to Investor Day, too. But I think overall, it should be up across the quarters.

With respect to leverage in '27 and beyond, again, I'll go back and say, while we're investing in some of these investments, our multiyear investments to set up a future of growth, we are also aware of the margin recovery story that we need to continue in 2027. So we have always two things going on at once. We're looking to make smart long-term investments in the business. But at the same time, we want to fuel that investment with productivity and savings. And so we kind of say, hey, we're investing for demand creation but we want to drive demand fulfillment efficiency as well.

And so -- and we're very good at that. And so we're going to continue to drive supply chain efficiencies. We're going to drive efficiencies between the lines like we've done with the transformation work. And continue to drive there, too. So our goal is, over time, we are going to see leverage across all of those lines.

Our next question comes from the line of Robert Moskow with TD Cowen.

I had a question about like just trying to understand how you forecast all of these macro factors at once. Like you have the SNAP cuts from a federal level, you have the waivers at the state level. You have the GLPs and then you have elasticity from higher pricing. And I think you've done a really good job of keeping things pretty conservative on the elasticity assumption. But the models that your team is working on, Steve, like can you figure out the cumulative impact of all these things at once? It sounds just like a lot to put into models that probably don't have a lot of historical precedents for that.

Yes. I mean, it's a challenge for sure. In each one, and we said this before, we've got -- we've got a small team on each of these, really trying to dig deep. And in the case as Kirk said, in the case of SNAP, we have people on the ground working with retailers to understand exactly how this is working out on shelf. What retailers are doing, what we're doing. And so we're trying to get firsthand information to build into these models.

And at the same time, we do try to run scenarios and they come up with a risk balanced view across these macros to try to come up with an assumption for the outlook. And I know we'll be wrong. I don't -- we've tried to be prudent and balanced in the way we look for, and project these out. But taking the best information that we have. We get smarter. Every month that goes by, we'll have more data. And I expect as some of these programs -- or excuse me, some of these things like SNAP, more states get involved, GLP-1s adoption gets easier, we're trying to predict different ways that could play out. And then again, how our portfolio can play offense against some of those challenges.

Okay. And that was kind of my follow-up. You said that you're working with retailers in a couple of states where the waivers are happening. Like can you be more specific on what playing offense means? Like what kind of things can you do?

Sure. You want me to take that one?

Yes, I can jump in. I like playing offense. [indiscernible] this exactly. Yes. I mean a lot of it has to do with, yes, when you work with customers, affordable price affordability still remains a really important part in driving other channels, too. So we have a big convenience business driving our immediate consumption business, driving availability of those top SKUs are incredibly important.

But I just go back to -- how do we drive the insights around the affordable price points, unique packages. Those are solutions with our customers. Again, 2 states out of the 12 states have been implemented. It's early days. We'll continue to discuss this as we get greater insights, and we'll talk about the tools that we're leveraging to curtail this headwind.

Our next question comes from the line of Scott Marks with Jefferies.

Two questions from me. The first one is on cocoa. I think previously, you had said that you were hedged for '26 above the rates you had locked in for '25, but that you also had some flexible hedging structures. So given the comments today around stable commodity basket, should we assume that means that your cocoa cost in '26 is actually in line with that of '25?

So yes. So cocoa is up just a little versus 2025. And when we said before is it's hedged above current market levels. So it's not hedged materially above '25, just hedged above our [indiscernible] trading right now.

When we -- just like we did last year, we've got a variety of hedging structures, and some of those structures allow us to participate in downside. So even in we have a little opportunity. It's not like it was last year to participate in downtime, but there's still a little bit there that if cocoa continues to decline, we'll have some potential. And then, of course, as we look to '27, placing hedges today would mean that we'd have deflation between '27 and '26. So we're watching that space. And again, we've got a very structured hedging policy to take advantage of that.

Understood. And then second question, today, there's obviously a lot of discussion around focusing with innovation and media behind some of the largest brands. And I think over the past maybe 1 year, 1.5 years, there was maybe a little more emphasis on supporting some of the smaller brands within the chocolate portfolio as well. So wondering if you can just kind of share how you're thinking about some of those tail brands and how we should be thinking about investment in those going forward?

Yes. This is really about world-class portfolio management. And we announced obviously Hershey's and [ Reese's ] big investment across those. That gives us a lot of momentum in the business, and that drives a lot of growth. We do have a beautiful portfolio across our Confection and Salty brands. And there are other tools that we're leveraging to grow those brands. So we are paying attention to the entire portfolio, and we're clear about each brand and the role it plays in our portfolio so that we can get to the consumers in a more targeted way. So it is a balance of both. It's not a trade-off between our large brands and our smaller brands that have lots of potential. We're investing across our portfolio. But it's very deliberate about the opportunity of each brand and the role it plays in our portfolio.

We'd like some of those small brands to become the next billion-dollar brands. And leveraging -- we're going to continue to leverage nonworking media to support new brands and occasions as well.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Carey with Wells Fargo Securities.

I just wanted to ask one follow-up on cocoa. Just as you think about 2027, how aggressive can you be about hedging the current drop. And if I heard it correctly, did I hear that, you don't need to take pricing in 2027. That's how you're viewing current levels right now? And then I have a follow-up.

So there's a couple of things in there. We're not going to get specific about 2027 hedging, but we will be very thoughtful. We have a program that gives us some structure in how we attack that. And -- but that's probably all we're going to share relative to that.

Relative to pricing, I think where cocoa is trading today, looking ahead to '27, it probably takes some pressure off pricing in the near term. We've taken price. We're going to execute and activate against that. In a broader sense, pricing is part of a long-term strategy, but it's only one part. We have mix and innovation and other ways to drive value price pack architecture. And so in the long term, we look at all of those things through the mix. It's just we happen to be in a case more recently because of cocoa to have to rely more on price.

Okay. Great. And then one quick follow-up would just be, when you think about volume, obviously, margins are recovering nicely. Do you have a view on where you want volumes to be as we look out over the next 18 months? And when you think volumes can get back to kind of flattish to positive?

Yes. I think Kirk kind of touched on this earlier. As we get -- we're going to be digesting the price increase in 2026, activating against it. As we get further out and we look to 2027 and beyond, our goal is to get back to a more balanced mix of price and volume. And we know we've got parts in the portfolio that even with some of the macro headwinds are set up for volume growth, sweets, better-for-you, premium, the functional products. And that's not the same we can't get volume at the core, just to say that even if you look at the macros, there are places where our portfolio can play stronger from a volume standpoint.

So again, this is something we'll also unpack more when we're together in March as we look out past '26. But recovering to, we've got equipment ready to go to make more candy. And so we're anxious to be able to deploy it against volume.

Yes. Let me just add just a couple of things. Yes, volume unit growth, occasion growth is really important to us. And we'll build on that. And we've got plans, of course, in '27 and '28 that we'll share. But it really is coming down to delivering that consumer occasion and driving growth in that. And we'll do that in a variety of ways, but that is a really important lever for us.

Our next question comes from the line of John Baumgartner with Mizuho Securities.

There was a comment this morning about investing in your protein portfolio. And it's been 6 years since the acquisition of [ One bar ]. So I imagine Hershey's gained some decent understanding of the category by now. How do you think about participating in protein as a theme? I mean to what extent do you view protein as sort of the hedge to retain consumers gravitating to healthier snacks? And I guess especially since we've seen numerous cases already of snacking flavors applied successfully in the protein space.

Yes. I think that's really a good question, really relevant for what we're talking about. Investing in our protein business. We have a really strong outlook for our protein business this year. We've invested in a lot of R&D around protein and fiber and things that our consumers are looking for.

I look at the total snacking universe and functional snacking is a reality, and we have to participate in that space. And we are. And we really like what we're building with [ One and fulfill ], and we'll continue to add resources against that and see the growth coming through. Yes, that is an area that we'll focus and build on for the future.

And then maybe to follow up on that, Kirk. Just considering how Hershey built the Salty snacks portfolio through M&A. I guess what's the feasibility or interest level to use balance sheet to expand similarly in protein? I mean does your interest level rise to build the portfolio of brands in subcategories? Or should we just think about future protein efforts really just anchored more to the [ One bar ] brand?

Yes, it's a big white space, and there's so much traction from consumers. I think you have to really be open to two, I mean both, right? Growing organically. We see lots of potential for the brands that we have. But we're also open for those opportunities that build our portfolio. So I would say we're open for that approach.

But the first thing, the things that we can control right now are, let's grow these businesses, let's innovate in these spaces, let's get thriving brands and then we'll be open for opportunities in the future.

Our next question comes from the line of Bingqing Zhu with Rothschild & Co Redburn.

My first one is try trying to follow up on the volume question. Because your 2026 guidance, 2.5%, 3.5% organic sales and 10% pricing, that embedded quite a meaningful volume/mix decline. I appreciate that you're early in the year and the elasticity is favorable so far. But how much volume decline are you confident absorbing before you would it reconsider pricing, and maybe link more towards promotion and price to support the volume? So -- and then I have a follow-up, please.

Sure. I mean the volume impact of the pricing that we have taken is embedded in the guide. And so we except that we don't like it. We want -- as we said several times, we want more volume growth. When we're together in March, we're going to talk more about that. But the volume impact of elasticity that we have inside the plan has been factored in.

In our plan between marketing dollar, promotion dollars, investments. We believe we have the agility inside the plant to be able to deploy to protect sensitive areas and respond if we see a concern. As we sit here today, as Kirk said, the market has been rational. The competitive environment is stable. So we don't have any particular pockets of concern. Elasticities are as expected. And so it's not a little better. And so -- but we're ready inside the plan to respond if we need to.

Okay. And then I have a follow- on pricing. So in the prepared remarks, you mentioned pricing to 10% in 2026. If I recall correctly, I think a few quarters back in Q2, when you announced the price increase you expect to be mid-teens in '26. So that's a bit lower than what you previously guided. Can you provide more color on that please? Does that mean you maybe wrote back some pricing you originally planned? Or what does that mean?

Yes, we haven't rolled back any pricing and maybe just a misunderstanding of we're talking by segment or we're talking overall company pricing increase, that might be where the misunderstanding is. But we've realized that the pricing that we had announced earlier in 2025, as we said earlier, the more recently announced pricing is already in the market. So from a pricing standpoint, everything is on track and the thing has been rolled back. And we're all in execution mode.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn the floor back to management for any final comments.

Thank you all for your questions, and we look forward to catching up with you over the coming days and weeks.

Yes. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Good morning, and welcome to the prerecorded discussion of the Hershey Company's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Results. I'm Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Hershey's President and CEO, Kirk Tanner, and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil. In addition to these remarks, we will host an analyst Q&A-only session at 08:30 a.m. Eastern on the morning of February 5. A replay of this webcast and our subsequent Q&A session will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website, along with their corresponding transcripts.

During the course of today's discussion, management will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release and the company's SEC filings.

Finally, please note that during today's discussion, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe will provide useful information for investors. The presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations to the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release, which is available on the Investor Relations page of our website.

It is now my pleasure to introduce our President and CEO, Kirk Tanner.

Thanks, Anoori. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I want to start by expressing my confidence and enthusiasm as we enter 2026, a true inflection point on our journey towards a stronger, more ambitious future. We're carrying meaningful momentum into the year with a clear and focused commitment to accelerating sustainable sales growth, restoring margins and positioning Hershey for the long-term success as we execute the first chapter of our strategy. In 2025, our team demonstrated remarkable agility and execution, successfully navigating a year marked by unprecedented cocoa inflation and broader macroeconomic volatility. We led through disciplined execution, strengthened relationships with our customers and delivering impactful innovation. These efforts drove top line growth and market share momentum in North American Confection and our Salty Snacks business, reinforcing our confidence as we look into 2026.

Now turning to our business performance. Total Hershey net sales increased 7% in the fourth quarter, and we delivered 4.4% net sales growth for the full year. The retail environment for U.S. snacking remained steady during the fourth quarter as consumers continue to spend selectively, prioritizing products that offer either emotional or functional value. Retail takeaway for the U.S. confectionery category accelerated in 2025, reflecting durable consumer demand.

For the year, confection was the third fastest-growing U.S. snacking category behind only nutritional bars and meat snacks. Hershey's U.S. confection retail sales growth was in line with the category in the fourth quarter, reflecting the strong performance of innovation, holiday programming and execution and favorable price elasticity. For the year, Hershey built upon its strengths and achieved annual market share gains across instant consumable chocolates, sweets, mints, and seasons. We're excited about 2026, and our plans will continue building on our areas of strength while accelerating within take-home chocolate and increasing our activation around key cultural events.

In 2025, our U.S. Salty Snacking business had an exceptionally strong year. Retail sales growth accelerated in the fourth quarter to 15.6%, resulting in an 11.3% increase for the full year. SkinnyPop ready-to-eat popcorn and Dot's Pretzels remain two of the fastest-growing brands among all top salty brands with retail sales growth of 8% and 21%, respectively, in the fourth quarter versus the prior year.

Moreover, our investments to meet growing demand for variety paths contributed nearly 2 points to the total retail growth in the quarter and 1.2 points for the full year. Our Salty Snack business gained nearly 40 basis points of share in 2025. Sustained organic growth along with the recent acquisition of LesserEvil, position us to have the third largest portfolio in the U.S. Salty Snack business. Thanks to our on-trend brands, considerable scale and robust capabilities, we are confident in delivering industry-leading growth over the long term. In 2025, the International segment achieved full year organic constant currency net sales growth of 2.2%, demonstrating resilience in the challenging market conditions.

Our teams maintained a strong focus on executing in our key markets, as shown by market share gains across Mexico, Brazil and the U.K. Additionally, Reese's continued to see robust international expansion, recording double-digit growth for the year and exceeding $300 million in net sales outside of the U.S. We are also delivering on our efficiency and transformation programs, strengthening our cost structure to fuel investment in our brands and capabilities.

Our AAA program has generated over $300 million in net savings over the past 2 years, above our plan and is projected to deliver an incremental $100 million in 2026. At the same time, our procurement team did a remarkable job navigating volatile cocoa markets in 2025, using agile hedging and sourcing strategies to significantly reduce the impact of cocoa inflation. These programs enable us to expand capability building investments in talent and technology and deliver differentiated performance into the future.

Looking ahead to 2026, we are operating in an environment where categories offering emotional, functional and experiential benefits remain strong. Three quarters of our portfolio sales at a price under $4, making these benefits widely accessible.

At the same time, we're monitoring several factors, including policy changes, consumer financial pressure and evolving health and wellness trends, which we believe we have planned for appropriately. Our strategic priorities for 2026 are clear: deliver top line growth at or above our market categories; drive sustainable margin and earnings improvement while increasing investments for sustainable growth in '27 and '28 and continue evolving our strategy and organization for the future.

Let me offer more detail across each of these. Our first priority is to drive sustainable top line growth. We have an exciting calendar of innovation launches and cultural activations backed by increased brand investments. Our plan gives us confidence in delivering between 4% and 5% net sales growth in 2026. Our innovation pipeline is strong with launches planned to meet a range of consumer needs and occasions that will drive category excitement and growth. Reese's OREO continues to outperform expectations, and we have increased production capability and capacity to meet sustained demand throughout 2026. We are introducing Shaq-A-Licious SLAMS, a multi-texture gummy that delivers a unique playful, sensory experience. We are launching Jolly Rancher Heatwave, which brings heat to the bold and adventurous palate.

In Salty Snacking, we are reformulating SkinnyPop White Cheddar and other dairy items to enhance the consumer experience and drive penetration in this key popcorn segment. We also have groundbreaking innovation coming from Hershey, Dot's and our protein portfolio. We look forward to sharing more details about these in our multiyear innovation road map at our Investor Day in March.

In 2026, we will activate 10 major cultural and seasonal moments with our strong in-store and online presence. Our campaigns began this weekend with the Olympics, followed by Valentine's Day, March Madness and Easter and continue with a scalable experiential calendar across seasons and new events throughout the year. This year, we will boost our media investment by double digits. During the first quarter, we will initiate new media campaigns for our 2 leading brands: Reese's and Hershey, making the first such launches in 8 years. We also continue to invest in Reese's and Hershey's internationally to accelerate trial on our largest global brands, New Pirate's Booty media and renovated packaging are also currently entering the market as we refresh and energize our third largest Salty Snacking brand.

Turning to our second priority. We are meaningfully restoring margin and earnings while reinvesting in our business for future growth. We will execute our pricing, productivity and cost savings programs with excellence and expect to deliver approximately 400 basis points of gross margin recovery in 2026.

We have been monitoring the impact of elasticities, particularly in January when seasonal interaction is lower. Our elasticity outlook has been modestly adjusted to reflect results that have been favorable versus our original forecast. However, we also acknowledge that numerous factors can affect elasticities over time, so we remain cautious. In 2026, we expect to deliver an incremental $230 million in efficiency and transformation program savings. These programs enable investment and technology to further strengthen our capabilities across consumer data insights, demand forecasting, commercial investments and supply chain agility. They will also further differentiate our industry-leading retail execution capabilities. Our annual plan also includes scaled investments in R&D, innovation and brand building. These focused projects advance our long-term brand and portfolio objectives and strengthen our execution capability for future growth.

Our third priority is to continue evolving our strategy and organization for the future. Next month, we will unveil our long-term vision focused on delivering sustained value to consumers, customers and shareholders in this dynamic marketplace. You'll hear more about our portfolio and capability-building initiatives that will advance our global snacking leadership.

In 2026, we will begin executing against this strategy by evolving our partnerships, strengthening our technology infrastructure and making foundational investments that position us for long-term competitive advantage. I'll now turn it over to Steve for details on our financial results and outlook.

Thank you, Kirk, and good morning, everyone. In 2025, we've delivered on our full year financial objectives while navigating a dynamic business environment with operational excellence and disciplined cost management. We achieved consolidated net sales of approximately $11.7 billion, an increase of 4.4% versus the prior year with organic constant currency growth of 4.2%. While earnings were pressured by unprecedented cocoa inflation and tariff volatility, we provided strong support for our brands, prioritize the strategic acquisition of LesserEvil and took decisive action with strategic pricing and cost efficiency and productivity programs.

These initiatives, in turn, supported top line momentum and material profit recovery and set us up for strategic investments in 2026 that will ensure our strong performance against our long-term algorithm.

Turning to the fourth quarter. Consolidated net sales increased 7% to $3.1 billion, with organic constant currency growth of 5.7%. Net price realization contributed approximately 9 points of growth partially offset by elasticity-driven volume declines in the North America Confectionery and International segments. Acquisitions added 1.2 points to grow reflecting the contributions from LesserEvil and Sour Strips. By segment, in the fourth quarter, North America Confectionery net sales increased 5.3%. The Sour Strips acquisition was a 40 basis point benefit. Net price realization was approximately 10 points, in line with our expectations. Volume decreased approximately 5 points as the impact of price elasticity was partially offset by strong performance on innovation and holiday programming as well as the benefit of 1 extra shipping day.

North America Salty snacks segment net sales increased 28% in the quarter with organic constant currency growth of 18.2%. Volume growth of approximately 14 points was driven by core distribution and velocity, innovation and the expansion of variety packs. The planned reduction of sales to private label customers was a mid-single-digit headwind to volume, largely offset by earlier shipments of New Year, New Me programming and 1 extra shipping day.

Net price realization contributed 4 points primarily due to lower promotional investment versus prior year. The acquisition of LesserEvil contributed approximately 10 points to segment growth. In the fourth quarter, the International segment net sales increased 0.4% to $256 million. Organic constant currency net sales declined 1.9% as net price realization of approximately 2 points was more than offset by a 4-point decline in volume.

Net price realization reflected strategic price increases in key markets around the world, partially offset by investments in portfolio optimization and distribution routes to support future growth. Volume declines reflected price elasticity and an approximate 4-point headwind from the timing of shipments.

Moving down the P&L. Fourth quarter adjusted gross margin was 38.3%, a decrease of 650 basis points versus prior year. This decline reflects commodity inflation, incremental tariff expenses of approximately $30 million and lower volume partially offset by net price realization, productivity and transformation program savings. This was ahead of our expectations, reflecting tariff policy relief and strong supply chain performance. Advertising and related consumer marketing expenses increased 4.2% in the quarter versus prior year, reflecting increased investment in Salty Snacks and International partially offset by reduced agency fees and higher media efficiencies in North America Confectionery.

Adjusted operating expenses, excluding advertising and related consumer marketing expenses, increased 12.6% driven by higher incentive compensation, partially offset by transformation program net savings. Our AAA transformation program delivered approximately $160 million in net savings in 2025, slightly ahead of our target, driven by incremental supply chain savings. We remain on track to deliver an incremental $100 million in net savings in the final year of our program in 2026.

Interest expense for the quarter was $48 million. The adjusted effective tax rate for the quarter was 23.4%, up from negative 13.7% last year, largely driven by fewer renewable energy tax credits versus the year ago period.

Turning to capital allocation. We continue to prioritize reinvestment in our business, including M&A in 2025. We completed the acquisition of LesserEvil in November 2025, which strengthens our better-for-you snacking platform and positions us to capture incremental growth in this fast-expanding category. Capital additions, including software, were $138 million in the fourth quarter, bringing the full year investment to approximately $455 million.

During the quarter, dividends distributed to shareholders amounted to $271 million, resulting in a total of $1.1 billion for the full year. We did not repurchase shares in the quarter with $470 million remaining under our current authorization.

Now let me share some perspective on 2026. We expect full year 2026 total company net sales growth of between 4% and 5%. Net sales related to the acquisition of LesserEvil is expected to add approximately 150 basis points to growth. The impact of foreign currency is expected to be immaterial. Total company organic net sales are projected to grow 2.5% to 3.5%, driven by announced pricing, innovation, increased brand investment and a strong activation calendar partly offset by a low single-digit decline in the International segment due to elasticity and strategic portfolio decisions supporting profit recovery.

Net price realization is anticipated to be approximately 10 percentage points. As Kirk mentioned, we now expect slightly lower sensitivity to pricing actions than previously planned. Our 2026 outlook also incorporates prudent assumptions for potential demand headwinds, including accelerated health and wellness trends and increasing GLP-1 adoption, government policy changes and ongoing consumer financial strain.

First quarter total company net sales are expected to increase by high single digits, reflecting the momentum we carry in from Q4. The benefit of an earlier Easter and favorable year-over-year comparisons in the convenience channel. For the full year, we expect adjusted gross margin recovery of around 400 basis points with very good visibility into our cost basket, we anticipate a low single-digit decline in our total cost of goods sold in 2026.

This represents the impact from elasticity-driven volume reductions, net of cost absorption, stable rates across our commodity and packaging basket and modest increases in labor and other manufacturing expenses, net of savings generated from our productivity and transformation initiatives. In the first quarter, we anticipate our overall company adjusted gross margin will continue to face pressure due to consumption of higher-cost commodities and tariff costs, a significant recovery is projected to begin in the second quarter.

As Kirk discussed, we are balancing our commitment to achieving the full profit potential of our business with our focus on long-term sustainable growth and strong margins. In 2026, you will see us increase our budgets for R&D, innovation, brand building and our retail sales team. We will talk more about these and expected returns at our Investor Day in March. Advertising and related consumer spending is expected to increase double digits versus the prior year as we support momentum across our business. Investment will be up across both working and nonworking media as we develop creative in support of our long-term brand and portfolio objectives.

Operating expenses, including divisional and corporate expenses, are expected to increase in line with sales. This reflects increased investment in capabilities, talent and technology, partially offset by favorability in incentive compensation and incremental transformation program savings. Below operating profit, we expect our full year 2026 adjusted effective tax rate to be approximately 25% to 27%. Other expense, which primarily reflects periodic costs relating to pension and other benefit plans, is expected to be approximately $15 million.

Finally, interest expense is expected to be between $200 million and $210 million. Our 2026 adjusted EPS outlook is for a range of 30% to 35%. In the first quarter, we anticipate earnings to decline low single digits, reflecting residual commodity and tariff pressure and elevated investment levels, which are expected to more than offset strong top line growth. Adjusted EPS is expected to grow by double digits each quarter throughout the remainder of 2026.

Our capital allocation priorities remain consistent. As discussed, we will continue to prioritize business reinvestment in 2026, including the addition of attractive accretive brands like LesserEvil. Capital expenditure is projected to be in the range of $425 million to $475 million for the year, inclusive of technology investments that aim to strengthen our supply chain and commercial capabilities with prudent investments.

Given our strong cash flow and our confidence in future business performance, we are raising our dividend by 6%. Moreover, we will look to evaluate opportunistic share repurchases to return excess cash and enhance long-term shareholder value. We are looking forward to sharing more details on our long-term strategy and capital allocation priorities at our Investor Day next month. With that, I will turn it back to Kirk for closing remarks.

Thank you, Steve. In closing, I want to thank our team members for their unwavering focus, execution and agility in 2025, which has resulted in the strong momentum we have today. We have clear visibility into our strategic brand and capability investments, solid operating plans and an improving cost outlook. We are confident in our ability to sustain our positive top line momentum, achieve significant profit recovery in 2026 and deliver long-term growth and sustainable value creation for our shareholders. We look forward to discussing this in more detail at our Investor Day on March 31st.

Greetings, and welcome to The Hershey Company Third Quarter 2025 Question-and-Answer Session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I'd now like to turn the call over to your host, Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations for The Hershey Company. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for The Hershey Company's third quarter 2025 earnings Q&A session. I hope everyone has had the chance to read our press release and listen to our prerecorded management remarks, both of which are available on our website. In addition, we have posted a transcript of the prerecorded remarks. At the conclusion of today's live Q&A session, we will also post a transcript and audio replay of this call.

Please note that during today's Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release and the company's SEC filings.

Finally, please note that we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide useful information for investors. This information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations for the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release.

Joining me today are Hershey's President and CEO, Kirk Tanner; and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil.

With that, we'll open it for the first question.

Our first question is from Andrew Lazar with Barclays.

Maybe to start off, I'd love to dig in a little bit deeper on your commentary around 2026. The company is looking for a non-algorithm top and bottom line year. This is consistent with the commentary you provided last quarter. Since then, cocoa costs have moderated significantly, even though Hershey still looks for year-over-year inflation. The company slightly lowered its tariff estimate and base momentum certainly appears to be continuing, if not accelerating. I think in the prepared remarks, you made mention of sort of earnings recovery over time. And in fairness, you still need to see what elasticity looks like as the pricing flows through. So I guess I'm just curious how you sort of balance these various factors as you think through how next year could shape up because as you know, there are some expectations out there for maybe much more significant year-over-year EPS growth next year.

Yes. Thank you, Andrew. I think that it's an important topic to get the morning started. Yes, if I think about '26, I look at where we're at right now. So the momentum in the business right now, I'm really delighted with the balanced growth that we're seeing across our portfolio. So I feel good about that before going into 2026. And I think it's important as you take that momentum into 2026. I think defining what success looks like is really important for us for 2026. And for me, that is looking at where the category is, and how we're growing with or ahead of the category while we build back that margin to its full potential. Now we won't do that just in 1 year, but we'll do that over a few years. But it's really important that we -- one, we grow, and we are doing exceptional at the category level, building back margin. And so what does that do? It puts us on our long-term algorithm. That long-term algorithm in the top -- from a revenue standpoint of 2% to 4%, that is sensible. We think that's where the category is going to be. Now in a shorter Easter category generally from a historical standpoint, it's been around 2%. So when you think about the top line, that's where we land. Now on EPS, back on algorithm, I would say there is some potential for some upside. But we do all this in '26 with the approach of playing for the long term. So we're going to continue -- we're going to invest in our business. We're going to invest in our brands, while we build back margin and compete at the category level. That is success for us in 2026.

That's really helpful, appreciate that. And then just quickly, I know it may be far too early to really opine on this with any accuracy. But I guess what are you seeing thus far from an elasticity standpoint? I know there's more pricing still to flow through. And I guess what's your expectation for elasticity in the context of your guidance for next year?

Sure. I'll take that one. I mean it's early days. And so we'll know more the next time we talk. The category continues to be rational. And everything we see so far, nothing gives us concern or is deviating from our expectations. Most of our pricing is reflected, as you said, other competitors' pricing still flowing through. We saw early in the year, other competitors taking prices. We saw premium go up. We saw private label go up. And so everything that we're seeing as our pricing has come to shelf is lining up within expectations. As you said, next year, that elasticity is a big assumption. And I know we've had some folks who said, well, are you being a bit cautious or conservative in the way you're thinking about that elasticity as we planned at minus 1. But we feel like it's an appropriate kind of center cut as we look at the plan for next year. This year, it's been running a bit better with the price increase that we've taken into this year. But this year also has a few positives coming along, whether it's long Easter, the merchandising benefits that we had early in the year, the significant innovation benefits. And so when we adjust for those as we think about '26, we think that minus 1 is the right place to plan from. So -- but we're watching the space closely, nothing at this stage gives us concern.

Our next question is from Max Gumport with BNP Paribas.

Great. Just following up on that elasticity response, and I realize it's early, but if you can just focus on the everyday business and give us a bit more color on what you're seeing in these first few weeks, particularly given the comments around double-digit growth across the everyday business over the past 5 weeks, what you think that means for elasticity? I realize it's early, I realize you're planning on the minus 1, but just any incremental color that would be helpful.

Yes. I would just say, again, no concerns on what we're seeing so far. If you look at everyday CMG where the price increases hit, we're up double digits in the last 4 weeks. So I feel good about what we're seeing so far. But more to play. We'll have more to say the next time we talk.

Great. And then on competition, I think there's been a narrative that some competitors are not following, and you just touched on this. But when I look at the data, it's not as clearly that's the case. I think if you look at your largest branded competitor, while their pricing might not be as high on a year-over-year basis, it looks like perhaps 2 are simply moving at different cadences with them moving harder earlier in the process. I think if you go back to where you all were 4 years ago, it looks like you're actually still just catching up on pricing relative to that period. So with that backdrop, I'm hoping you can provide a bit more color on what you're seeing to be competitive pricing environment right now.

Yes. Look, I think that's an important point and had the opportunity to look at the competitive landscape and look at our pricing cadence as it relates to -- look, we -- I think we put -- the most important thing for us is we put the consumer first. We look at our business. We do it on the cadence that makes sense for our business and our consumer. And we are working with our customers to make that happen in the most deliberate way so that we can continue to deliver for our consumers. And that, I think, is really important. Now the cadence, yes, is probably a little different from historic purposes. But I look at it from what is the best solution for the category, our consumer and for our business.

And a pretty significant part of our price increase, and you mentioned this, was catching up to what happened earlier that competitors have done. So there was a time in history where everything moved in lockstep. Now I think everyone is more precise, more strategic as the way they execute pricing and it leads to different phasing. But overall, we're not concerned about price gaps across the portfolio.

Yes. And I would say one thing to look at is this category has been very resilient and rational. I think that's really important when you look across the industry. That gives us the confidence that we're making the right decisions, and we don't have concerns at this time.

Our next question is from David Palmer with Evercore ISI.

In the prepared remarks, you noted Halloween has been disappointing. I'd love to get some color about how much is -- by what sort of level has it been disappointing? And you've noted Friday, Halloween, warm weather. Have you seen similar headwinds with those types of dynamics to what you're seeing here, or do you -- you're reflecting on this? Do you think there might be something going on with the consumer, the customers in terms of their focus on the seasons, the competitive environment? And then relatedly, you said that you're using this opportunity to analyze the trends and to adjust the product lineup and marketing strategies for future seasons. So just curious about what you're thinking as you reflect on this so far.

Yes, David, thank you for the question. I think it's certainly timely. I'd start with -- we're pleased with the strength in the overall business with more balance across our portfolio. And we mentioned our everyday CMG business is growing double digits the past 4 weeks. So there's certainly some interplay that we typically see. We'll say the season did get off to a slow start. And I think you have to look at historically when Halloween falls on a Friday, about 1/3 of the business is sold the last week. So I think it's really important. Having said that, yes, there are some opportunities for us. I would say it's not broad-based, but there are some opportunities for us to go to school on the consumer insights, our customer insights so that we can improve on every season, including next year's Halloween. So we will look at pack types, offerings, opening price points, product mix, all that through the lens of the consumer. Yes, I think this is an opportunity for us to go to school and get better with each season.

And just a follow-up on, you noted that cocoa is going to be inflationary in '26. Does it feel like retailers are sympathetic to where you are with your pricing and your input inflation? You seem to have hedged very well in '25, maybe somebody didn't out there and their timing of their pricing might be mismatching yours. And so I'm wondering if there could be some noise out there with regard to competitors and other pricing actions that could affect near-term results? And I'll pass it on.

Yes. No, thanks, David. I think it's really important one that we have relationships of trust with our customers and building those are critically important to me and our entire organization. We have that customer mindset. And with this pricing, we have worked hand-in-hand with our customers to find solutions to meet consumers where they are. I would say from a cocoa standpoint, it's still 70% higher than it was in 2023. So I think that just grounds us all in where cocoa is today. I know there's -- we're optimistic with some of the movement recently. But if you just look back, that's really important to understand. But I'd say with pricing, very planful approach. I have a fresh set of eyes on our approach and our communication to customers, our partnership with customers, and I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of our customers myself. And that is something that's really important that we get that right with our customers.

Our next question is from Leah Jordan with Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to ask about innovation. It's obviously been working well this year, especially in the back half here. So as we look to '26, could you provide some color on how you're thinking about the pipeline there? What are the key focus areas? And how are you thinking about balancing growth in the core versus innovation into next year, especially as we're going to lap some strength here in the back half?

Yes. I think that's a really good question. Innovation is so important to the category. Consumers are continuously looking for it. The recent innovation that we put out with REESE'S Oreo has been really the top driver of growth from an innovation standpoint in the category. So something to look at and be excited about. But when I step back from that, I look at our core business even in Q3, where our core business was close to 5% growth without REESE'S Oreo. And that says something about the balance of what we expect. Now we're going to have the benefit of most of next year with REESE Oreo, and we'll continue to build on that momentum and find exciting ways to connect consumers with that innovation. Having said that, we have a robust pipeline in 2026 of innovation and 2027. So we feel like we're building this pipeline of innovation because that's, again, engaging with consumers is important, all while balancing your growth with your core business. I think that is really important. And that's kind of how we see this. We cannot rely just on innovation to drive our business. It's a balance between the 2. And if I look at Q3, we have struck that balance with a really good innovation.

That's very helpful. And maybe just a quick follow-up here. It sounded like there was increased brand investments in the quarter. Maybe you could just talk about where you're making those investments, and what you're seeing in the competitive environment broadly? And do you see a need to make more investments just in the current environment?

Yes, I think it's important to invest. I think there's a smarter way to invest in brands as well, right? So there's a more efficient way to invest in brands. I think that, obviously, with Halloween and the holidays, we've invested in some digital marketing to drive performance, drive flow-through, et cetera. But will -- and I would say we've had some fun with some innovation with REESE'S Oreo as well. So those investments have given us some momentum and really are on strategy for how we think about our business going forward.

Our next question is from Megan Clapp with Morgan Stanley.

I wanted to come back to the commentary on 2026 and Andrew's question at the beginning. Last quarter, there was a comment on the call that there were multiple paths to EPS being well into the double-digit range in 2026. I think the biggest factors mentioned at the time were what happens with tariffs and cocoa costs. And I understand, Kirk, I think you said there's still upside to the algo. But as you think about some of those puts and takes today, and would you say that anything has changed that would affect that view? Cocoa has obviously come down. Maybe you're a bit more covered for 2026, though at this point? And broadly, any visibility on potential tariff relief as well?

Yes. Thanks, Megan. Again, to comment on the potential upside for EPS, I'll let Steve kind of go through the puts and takes that you asked. Thanks for the question, Megan.

Yes. As Kirk said earlier, above algorithm performance is definitely on the table. There's a handful of things that we're going to be watching really closely, especially as we finalize the plan. Consumer demand, of course, the health of the consumer right now, big focus. Right now, we're optimistic on that for next year, but we'll be watching that. We talked about innovation. I feel really good about our innovation, Oreo continuing, a lot of tentpole events next year. So we think that's going to be a big year for innovation. Elasticity, of course, as we touched on in the question earlier. And then as you said, cocoa and tariff relief. We're feeling marginally better about cocoa. I think when we talked last time since then, it's moderated a bit, and we're in the process of layering in our hedges according to our program, and we'll have more visibility when we talk next time. But net-net, feeling a bit better from a cocoa standpoint. And tariffs, ongoing changes week to week. I think the first prize we were hoping for a blanket exemption is probably not in the near-term cards, but we've seen significant acceleration on trade deals. And so now that cocoa and other commodities we can't make here are part of that third annex as those deals come in, we're optimistic we could see some positivity there. For now, we've modeled $200 million incremental on tariffs and still have in our model cocoa inflation for next year. But I would say that level of inflation is moderating, and we'll know more when we talk next time. So overall, it's not that much different from last quarter other than maybe a little bit more optimism on tariffs and cocoa.

Awesome, that's super helpful. And then maybe just more near term on the implied 4Q. It does seem like most of the increase in the full year top line guide was driven by what you saw in the third quarter. I think depending on rounding, implied 4Q is maybe a little bit below where the street is modeling, maybe part of that's due to the international shipment timing. But could you just maybe give us what you're expecting for the fourth quarter explicitly and whether the outlook for North America confectionery has just changed at all just given the puts and takes between Halloween and Everyday?

Sure. Yes, most of that impact is international shipment timing. From a U.S. CMG standpoint, we see the momentum continuing. As Kirk said, we're directing some additional investment to help Halloween sell-through and performance and also get holiday off to a good start. So that's a little bit of why the EPS doesn't follow the sales on the back half or the guide up on EPS is a little softer than it is on the top line. But we also watch as we always do, the timing of cocoa hedges, which was a favorable for Q3. We're not expecting quite that same level of favorability as we close out the year. So -- but yes, on the top line, that international timing is probably the biggest thing. We expect CMG momentum to continue.

Our next question is from Tom Palmer with JPMorgan.

I'm going to maybe stick to Halloween for a second. You noted the slower start to Halloween and that when Halloween falls on a Friday, there can be this last week waiting. If we do get 1/3 of your Halloween sales in the last week, would it be more on track with how you're thinking about it, or do you need even more of kind of a disproportionate catch-up when we think about this year? And in particular, I want to make sure like how this relates to kind of what's embedded in guidance?

Yes. I think that to get straight to it, I think it still would be somewhat soft. I think that we would walk away saying that Halloween by itself is going to be a little soft in the season. I do think there -- the interplay between our core brands is happening, and we're seeing some of that in the insights that we're looking at. I think that's obvious. We also have a big innovation out there, and we have core packs that are performing well. So the interplay between Halloween, the season and our core packages certainly is something we're going to school on, and we can talk about later. But let's see where the week comes in. And then we will share the insights and some of our action plans moving forward. But winning at the season is critically important to us, and we continue to build on our capabilities through insights and the actions that we need to do to move the business forward.

Okay. And then just, look, I think on the cocoa commentary, I want to clarify, one, at some point next year, your cocoa costs likely turn deflationary even if they're up for the full year. And I'm curious your views on pricing as inflation eases. I don't think you've historically given back pricing, but we are facing kind of unusual levels of both inflation and potentially deflation. So I wanted maybe a clarification on how you're thinking about it this time.

Sure. On the first part of your question, yes, I mean, the expectation right now with where cocoa is, I would hope, as we get deeper into '26, we'd start to see some deflation. Again, we'll have a better picture of that profile when we talk next time. But just based on what we're seeing right now and looking year-over-year. And again, giving back price, I guess I'll start with a comment from earlier. We're still seeing cocoa up 70% from where we started the cocoa inflation journey. And so we haven't fully recovered from that. And so -- and again, pricing is not the only lever. We are driving the transformation program. We're driving savings. So we will continue to use every lever at our disposal to do that. But at the same time, we want to make sure that we're investing in our brands and that we're driving good partnership with retailers and making sure we're helping to, again, grow at or above the category. So we're going to have a focus on balanced recovery, as Kirk said earlier.

Our next question is from Peter Galbo with Bank of America.

Steve, not to belabor the pricing dynamic point again, but I do think some of the hesitation maybe is stemming from the fact that one of your peers operating in Europe kind of talked about a need maybe to solve some price gap issues. You obviously have a peer that competes both in the U.S. and Europe. So the translation of that dynamic happening in Europe, back to the U.S., is there kind of a future where the same thing happens. So maybe it would be helpful just compare and contrast just the structural factors that might make the U.S. market where you operate different from that pricing standpoint. And I think that would help clarify a bit of the fear that's out there that, hey, there's all this pricing that's coming in the market, but with cocoa coming down, are they really going to be able to kind of hold through?

Yes, you bet. So I do think it's 2 different markets, and I think we have to be careful kind of taking the assumptions from one and applying them to another. The U.S. category, CMG has been very resilient. It's been very rational. And we just aren't seeing today any major price gaps that are causing us concern. Obviously, we're watching consumer health. We're partnering closely with retailers to make sure that the category stays healthy and growing, and we want to be part of that with our innovation and brand investment, et cetera. But it is a different situation here than what you're seeing in Europe. And that rationality here, I guess we have no reason to believe that's not going to continue based on everything we're seeing even in the market right now.

Great. Super helpful and clear. And maybe as a follow-up, Steve, I actually wanted to ask on international. I know you had the shipment favorability dynamic, but it was actually a loss-making quarter in that business. So I guess just applying that forward, right, if you don't have the favorability on shipments in Q4, like should we be expecting, I don't know, the next couple of quarters that you might still be playing catch-up to get back to profitability, or how we should think about that segment specifically?

Yes, it's a great question. We don't always have time to talk about international. I think, yes, we're -- I mean, it's a challenging market because a lot of our business in international is cocoa driven, and even cocoa intense in some markets where the percent of cocoa is part of the advertising. And so it feels more of the brunt from cocoa. It will also eventually feel more of the recovery when we get to the other side. We've been more aggressive on pricing in international, but because we're a smaller player in some of those markets and our products are positioned in a more premium way, the elasticity impacts are also more severe than what we model here in the U.S. That said, we're optimistic on the business. And in fact, we're growing share in all but one probably of our core markets right now. We feel good about that. We've had a great result in Brazil. And yes, profitability isn't there right now, but we still are optimistic about the market and our ability to grow and eventually return to profitability. So despite the numbers, we're optimistic on the future, but we have to work through the cocoa challenges there a little bit more intensely than we do here in the U.S.

Our next question is from Jim Salera with Stephens Inc.

I wanted to maybe shift gears a little bit and ask on salty snacks, given the strong performance you guys saw there. I think you mentioned in the prepared remarks, you did 14% year-over-year increase in consumption, saw share gains in salty, particularly driven by volume, which is in pretty stark contrast to a category that's been anemic kind of at best this year. Can you just walk us through what are kind of the driving factors there? And maybe any commentary on 4Q about how we should think about that business kind of closing out the year and anything we should be aware of maybe on the innovation side?

Yes, Jim, thank you for the question. Look, our salty business, I'm really excited about this. We continue to build capabilities with our salty team and our salty business. And I look at where we are in the category with our brands, and how important that is. So with SkinnyPop leading in the popcorn category, it, of course, went through a refresh. It's got a new look, and it's delivering against growth. It's also -- we're working on portion control and multipack is working. So we see a lot there. But again, it's grounded in permissible snacking, premium snacking, and that makes a difference. When I look at our pretzel business in Dot's, Dot's really has made an impact on Pretzels. Now Dot's is the leader in the Pretzels category. For a young brand, that's pretty impressive. It's hitting on a lot of marks with consumers. It is definitely in the right place in the category, and it's helping the category grow. And then I think we still have a lot of opportunity with Pirate's Booty. It's in Puffs. Puffs is the third largest part of the category, and we're just scratching the surface. So it's over a $4.5 billion category. We have an opportunity to play in that with a mom preferred loved brand. So the collection of brands that we have in the right places with permissible snacking allow us to grow ahead of the category. We'll continue to build on that momentum. We'll continue to look to our salty business to scale that and build our capabilities. But having a lot of experience in this area, I'm really optimistic of where we can take the salty business.

Great. And maybe just any commentary you could provide on innovation and to the extent that you can maybe point us in a direction for 4Q, I mean, should we expect kind of continuation of where we're at now, acceleration? Just any thoughts around that to close out the year.

Yes. Yes. Yes, we see the same -- the momentum moving forward into 2026. We have some innovation on Dot's that I'm really excited about. We also have innovation on SkinnyPop in that -- across the portfolio. We've looked at multiple areas across kind of all 3 brands actually. And there is a pipeline of innovation across our portfolio. So yes, more to come on the launches of the innovation. But yes, we have a pipeline that will drive growth and delivery. And there's some exciting things across Dot's, SkinnyPop and Pirate's Booty.

Our next question is from Robert Moskow with TD Cowen.

Two questions. One is, Steve, when you're giving the factors that might determine whether there's double-digit potential, you mentioned several. But is it fair to say that elasticity is probably the most -- the biggest and most determining factor? And since it's hard to predict, would you consider providing a wider range than normal for 2026 guidance to take that into account? And then I had a quick follow-up.

Sure. Yes. Great question. I would say elasticity probably is the biggest -- I mean, obviously, cocoa is huge as well. But elasticity is one we'll be watching very closely. From what we see now, like we talked about earlier, not concerned, but we'll be watching it closely. On the range, it's an interesting point. I think that's something we'll give some thought to between now and the time here and giving guidance, depending on what we'll see. I think we will see more on elasticity. We'll have a better view of cocoa by that point. Maybe tariffs, maybe not, but it's a good point, something we'll probably think about.

Okay. And in doing a deeper dive into these price gaps that emerged, what we really found was some pretty sizable ones in king size in the convenience channel after you raised price between you and your biggest competitor. But I think your competitor raised prices since then. So is it fair to say that, that gap does exist, but it's just kind of temporary and will close soon?

Yes. I would say I don't want to get down to pack type by pack type retailer sort of detail. But like I say, we have all of that. We've seen what you're talking about on king size. We look at every packing of retailer. Right now, there are some gaps in places. Some of those gaps are closing. Some of those gaps may hang around for a while. But as we look at them in the aggregate, there's nothing that's concerning us at this stage. Recall, there is this sort of give and take, and we talked about it before about the cadence of the follow can take a little while. Sometimes we choose to take a little while to follow. And so this is part of the category, which is still rational. It just doesn't fall in a perfect cadence all the time.

Our next question is from Alexia Howard with Bernstein.

Can I ask about the C-store channel? I think Rob mentioned it. It seems as though you were having some trouble with that earlier in the year. It seemed to be in recovery, I think, over the last few months. Is that still going fairly strongly at this point? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes. Thank you. I appreciate the question. I'm really passionate about the convenience channel. I just had the opportunity to be at NACS in Chicago and talk to a lot of our customers. Look, I think about the performance of the category in convenience right now and CMG is performing at a plus 6. So pretty healthy cadence in CMG right now. I think there are still some opportunities for us to get stronger. And we are hyper focused on [ IC ] and our ability to execute, and we've rolled out these gold standard merchandising plans. We've built this innovation pipeline. We're building on tentpole moments, all with the lens of delivering for our convenience customers. So there is a level of intensity that we're putting against the convenience channel because we know it is a priority. We know [ IC ] is a real priority for us as it's a big brand builder and an area where we can continue to grow our brand. So we're going to show up strong. We like the momentum that we have. We still think there's opportunity for us to get better, and we'll do all that with the partnership with our convenience customers.

And as a follow-up, there's been a lot of questions on innovation. Are you able to put any numbers around that in terms of percentage of sales from new products introduced either over the last year or last 3 years? And how that's ramped over time because it seemed as though innovation dropped off in the years immediately after the pandemic.

Yes. innovation is such an important lever for sure. But I think being consistent with innovation is also important in balance with your core business. I'd tell you one thing that I really liked about this last innovation that we launched with REESE'S Oreo, especially in convenience as we're talking about that channel is. We co-merchandised it with our core brands, and we saw our core brands elevate with innovation. And I think that is just a testament to the execution that we have in the marketplace, not just highlighting our innovation, but bringing our core along with it, I think, is a really good thing for us to do. It's a fundamental that we believe in. And so that, I think, takes the total portfolio into account. I think innovation is critical. Consumers are looking for it. But if it can help build your core brands as well, I think you're in a much better place.

Our next question is from Scott Marks with Jefferies.

You've made some comments today about monitoring the consumer health. And I think we've heard from some of your peers about more broadly just weakening U.S. consumer sentiment. So just wondering if you can share with us your thoughts around what exactly you're seeing with the consumer, and how you're thinking about that as we head into the holidays and 2026?

Yes. I think that's an important topic, and I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of our customers as well. I think the consumer certainly is continuing to be challenged. It's a challenging consumer market, and there's a lot of headlines that have been talked about driving that concern. But I would say, our category remains resilient. I think that's an important thing to think about. So the impact of consumers, how that interacts with the category and how it's reacting to our business. I think those are the dynamics we look at. But I would say, in large part, the other consumer is certainly under pressure. Our category is showing up resilient, I think really importantly. And then as we look into '26, we see the category running at historic levels with those pressures. So I feel really confident about where we're at in light of a challenged consumer.

Appreciate that. And then just a follow-up question. We've also started to hear from some of your peers about expected headwinds from changes to the SNAP program, both policy changes, which could be more structural and then maybe more temporary government shutdown-related issues. Just wondering if you can share with us some context around how you're thinking about potential SNAP headwinds for the business?

Yes. I think it's an important one. Again, a live discussion that we've had with our customers and understanding the impact overall of SNAP. If you just take a step back and look at SNAP, about 2% of SNAP dollars are in the category, the CMG category specifically. Right now, we've seen -- I would say we haven't seen a large impact, but it's early days. I think if you look into '26 with the dynamics between the state and the federal government on SNAP, we expect it to be a minimal impact right now on the category. But it's something that we're continuously watching and trying to understand. I think it comes down to the behaviors of consumers that are in the SNAP program, and how they choose to spend those dollars, but we will stay close. But I would say in '26, it will have a minimal impact to the business from what we're seeing right now.

Our next question is from Michael Lavery with Piper Sandler.

Just wanted to come back to cocoa and you said that you could get some benefit if costs fall further, but it sounds like you're maybe also a bit decently committed, and that you're focused with your hedges on visibility and less volatility. Maybe could you just give a sense of how wide a range is still ahead of you? You're forecasting it to be inflationary. That might moderate a bit, but would you be positioned such that it wouldn't be deflationary, or just maybe give us a sense of how wide a range of possibilities are still in front of you?

Sure. Yes, I'd be happy to. So the fundamental hedging program, as you said, Michael, hasn't really changed. We're hedged, I would say, to the normal level we would be at this time of the year, given that we still believe cocoa does have some room to fall based on the fundamentals that we've talked about in the past. And so right now, we see it on a full year basis, we see it inflationary, but there is a possibility of deflation. And the way we've structured our program, as many do, we have a mix of some things that are price fixed and some things that allow downside participation. And so between the unhedged portion looking forward and downside participation, there is potential if we continue to see some fall in cocoa that we could see some deflationary, but it just a lot depends on timing and the magnitude.

Okay. That's helpful. And you've said in the past that around 75% of your portfolio is less than $4, I guess, how does that look after this latest pricing? And then is that sort of the key threshold? We hear $3 from some other snack peers as maybe a key focus point as well. Any sense of maybe kind of where you are sitting today relative to maybe either one of those thresholds?

Yes. I think that 75% of our units are below $4. I think that's -- it's an important to understand where consumers are with price points and with the offerings that we have. But I would say that, that's largely the case today.

Our next question is from Chris Carey with Wells Fargo.

We are late in the call. So I'm just going to ask a couple of clarifying questions, if I could. Just on this conversation around algorithm for next year, kind of similar commentary despite the lower cocoa. Is it fair to say that if cocoa had not come down, you probably would have to take even more pricing into next year, and now you're basically not in that situation anymore. And then -- yes, go ahead.

I was going to say no. I don't think at this point, we're not focused on pricing. We've got the price increase we've just announced rolling through. But we continue to work all the other levers as well, whether cocoa goes up, down or sideways in terms of productivity, driving our transformation savings, continuous improvement, et cetera. So right now, we're focused on driving -- continuing the momentum in the business and making sure that we have the good execution on the pricing that's already in the market and focused on a balanced approach to driving the business for the long term.

Great. I guess, is it fair to say that if cocoa did not fall, you would have to assess whether additional pricing would be needed? And then just a quick -- so just a quick clarification there. And then I think the tax rate came up. Obviously, there's been a sort of reorientation of tax rate. Can you just give a sense of what's going on there and medium-term tax planning and opportunity?

Sure. So just back to the first question. In '26, we would not anticipate taking more pricing even if cocoa remained at prior levels. Now long term, again, we have to manage over a long window. So to be on algorithm, we would continue to look at pricing as a long-term lever, but not for '26. Hopefully, that helps. Again, cocoa, we're still executing and making sure the price increases that we've announced flow through. The -- on tax rate, yes, happy to talk about it. It's been a bit of a change this year. In fact, it's probably been a topic every quarter. And we have a couple of things that are happening, a couple of which are unusual to this year and one that we're still working through for next year. But on one hand, we have 3 things hitting the tax rate. One, some adjustments in reserves based on some legacy positions and legacy litigation. We didn't have any of that in the third quarter. But you'll recall in a couple of earlier quarters, we talked a little bit about having some reserve adjustments. The second piece is related to some procurement strategies. So earlier in this year, as we looked at different sourcing alternatives for cocoa, which we pursued, drove great ROI, but had some less tax efficiency than our normal procurement strategies. And then finally, the tax credit strategies, which we've talked about. In the current environment, we just haven't found as many attractive tax credit investment opportunities. Again, we've got ROI thresholds, quality thresholds. And with the movement in the investment universe for those, they just haven't been as attractive given our threshold. So those are the 3 things that have been impacting tax rate for this year. We'll give more guidance on next year's tax rate and some of the factors there when we get to guidance later.

Chris, I just wanted to share my point of view on '26 and the pricing questions that you asked. Look, I think if you go back to what we talked about, what '26 looks like from a success standpoint, certainly getting back on algorithm. We talked about the potential for EPS. But I think it's really important to get this message across. We retain the flexibility to invest in our business. We're playing this for the long haul. We have a lot of energy and enthusiasm in the business right now. We want to keep that momentum. There's also a lot of great new ideas to drive growth and health for the business over the long term while we recover our margin that we've gone backwards on. So I think that balance, I think, is what I would leave you with is we still have that flexibility. We're enthusiastic about what we see with momentum, but also the opportunities we have to invest in for the future. So certainly a balance of how we build the business.

Our next question is from John Baumgartner with Mizuho Securities.

Maybe just sticking with convenience stores, Kirk, just bigger picture, I'd like to hear your observations of the retail landscape for competitive merchandising and promo, just having seen it in your seat across multiple categories over the years, how promo merch has evolved given the rise of smaller brands, healthy snacks, non-CMG categories. Just how has competition changed for that high visibility merchandising? How do you see confectionery positioned today to compete? And are there any changes you think Hershey can make in terms of either existing spend levels or types of promotion?

Yes, I think that's the right question, and I think it is changing. I think, John, you've asked a good question in convenience, if you spend time with the retailers, you'll see certainly, new solutions to drive the customer performance from their standpoint. We've seen a lot of new merchandising strategies, a lot of new ways to deliver value for consumers across multiple categories in convenience. I think it's really important that we play a growth driver role inside the store, and that is delivered across our core innovation, and how we deliver value in multiple transactions and things that consumers are doing. I think that there's also new tools that are exciting. So there's loyalty and tools that retailers are using that we're participating in that drive personalization and loyalty. So there's so many new fascinating ways to grow the business. And again, I'm super passionate about this channel and our opportunities to build brand and build momentum. And it will be a focus point for us moving forward.

There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the floor back over to Anoori Naughton for any closing comments.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. We look forward to our follow-up calls this afternoon. Thanks.

This concludes today conference. You can disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Good morning, and welcome to the pre-recorded discussion of the Hershey Company's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Results. I'm Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Hershey's President and CEO, Kirk Tanner; and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil.

In addition to these remarks, we will host an analyst Q&A-only session at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on the morning of October 30. A replay of this webcast and our subsequent Q&A session will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website, along with their corresponding transcripts.

During the course of today's discussion, management will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected.

The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release and the company's SEC filings.

Finally, please note that during today's discussion, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe will provide useful information for investors. The presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations to the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release, which is available on the Investor Relations page of our website.

It is now my pleasure to introduce our President and CEO, Kirk Tanner.

Thank you, Anoori, and good morning, everyone. I have the honor of joining the Hershey Company as President and CEO in August, but I followed and admired Hershey throughout out my 30-year-plus career in food and beverage. This is a rare purpose-driven company with a long history of enhancing life special moments big and small. I'm excited and honored to lead this great company, and I'm grateful to the Board, executive leadership team and colleagues across the company for the warm welcome.

Three months in, my observations on Hershey track closely to what I'd hope for. Before we dig into results, let me share what I'm seeing across three areas: our people and purpose, our iconic brands and robust capabilities and our strong execution against plans.

First, our people and purpose from the leadership team to the 19,000-plus colleagues worldwide, this team is exceptional. Our purpose, making more moments of goodness and Hershey's founding values permeate everything we do. There is a commitment to doing right by all of our stakeholders. The Milton Hershey School is a powerful point of pride that brings this to life. I've seen this commitment in countless ways already, and I am confident this is the team that will steer Hershey into the next generation of growth.

Our iconic brands play a unique role in people's everyday lives, and that connection drives our success. We have a strong presence in resilient categories and are well positioned to deliver balanced growth. That is supported by our strong capabilities across areas such as supply chain and manufacturing, retail sales, strategic revenue growth management, R&D and innovation. I'll come back to that point in a few minutes with an update on the success of our highly anticipated Reese’s and Oreo collaboration.

And finally, our delivery against plans. We have loved brands and resilient categories, underpinned by a strong foundation across the business. But it's our relentless execution that will make our vision of becoming a multi-category snacking leader, a reality. The business environment has been dynamic, and I want to commend the team for staying focused and executing against key objectives throughout a challenging year.

To highlight a few of these accomplishments, year-to-date, the team have returned Hershey chocolate retail sales growth to 4% after previous 1% decline in 2024. Increased suite penetration by 65 basis points through innovation and brand building driven mainstream U.S. candy, mint and gum market share expansion of over 15 basis points. Revitalized SkinnyPopp with new packaging, marketing and price pack architecture that achieved 6% retail sales growth.

Secured U.S. pretzel market share leadership with Dot's, an expanded share across most key international markets and responded to inflation with disciplined cost control and expanding transformation effort and strategic pricing. We are benefiting from the positive results of these actions and are pleased with the momentum we're seeing across the business.

With that, I'll turn to the third quarter performance. Total Hershey net sales increased 6.5%. Organic constant currency net sales growth of 6.2% was ahead of expectations, driven by strong innovation, strategic brand investments and market-leading execution. The net impact of acquisitions and divestitures was a 30 basis point benefit driven by our Sour strips acquisition. Demand within the U.S. candy, mint and gum category continues to demonstrate resilience and expandability through innovation and new consumer occasions.

Our in-store execution, IO optimization, innovation and media and brand investments are contributing to accelerated performance. Hershey CMG retail sales increased 5.4% versus the prior year in the 12 weeks ending September 28. Retail takeaway growth was led by the nonseasonal business, which increased to 6.6% from 4.7% in the previous quarter, resulting in a share gain of more than 10 basis points. This strong performance was balanced across core brands and innovation, as well as across instant consumables and take-home items. Consumption exceeded category growth in 4 of the top 5 franchises with Reese’s up 7%, Hershey up 11%, Cadbury up 10% and Jolly Rancher up nearly 30% in the quarter versus prior year.

Hershey's Better-For-You portfolio also contributed with 8.5% growth in the quarter, driven by double-digit growth in our Zero Sugar platform and Brookside. In the third quarter, Hershey products comprised 5 of the top 10 innovations in U.S. confection, reflecting our bigger, bolder, more impactful innovation strategy.

Reese’s Oreo was the top new item in the category in Q3, and retail sales trends are exceeding our internal targets. Trial and repeat are very strong and in the top quartile across all major manufacturer chocolate innovation in the past 3 years. Moreover, early data shows that Reese’s Oreo over-indexes with Gen Z and millennial buyers, a priority audience for the brand.

Looking ahead, we plan to sustain engagement and boost awareness with fresh, creative and partnerships to promote Reese’s Oreo across TikTok, Instagram and live events. Jolly Rancher ropes, freeze-dried candies and Shaq-a-licious Gummies are also top innovations in the category and expanding our reach into new consumer segments.

Our marketing strategies for Shaq-a-licious Gummies focuses on raising awareness and authentic engagement with young consumers. Recently, we held pop-up events at Basketball City and other New York City basketball courts generating excitement and media coverage that spans from sneaker culture and basketball communities to mainstream TV.

We are encouraged by the robust performance of our U.S. confection business into October and the increasingly balanced contribution across our portfolio, which are essential for sustained growth and continued improvement in market share. Our everyday CMG retail sales increased 12% in the past 4 weeks, with double-digit growth across chocolate, sweets and mints.

Although the Halloween season began slower than anticipated, it was likely influenced by factors such as warmer weather conditions and a concentration of seasonal purchases in the final week due to Halloween occurring on a Friday. While Hershey's Halloween performance has been disappointing, the softness is not broad-based across our business. We are using this opportunity to analyze the trends and will adjust our product lineup and marketing strategies for future seasons.

Moreover, we remain confident that the seasonal tradition continues to be important to consumers with the Halloween participation rate expected to be in line with 2024. Our retail teams have been hard at work, ensuring that consumers can purchase all their favorite Halloween treats in the final days leading up to celebrations this weekend. We have also added additional investments to support both Halloween and holiday seasons.

Finally, our North American confectionery pricing initiative remains on track. Our teams partner closely with retailers to execute our strategic pricing, which is starting to be reflected on shelves. As a reminder, the actions we have put into place did not fully cover the commodity inflation we have experienced over the past 2 years. While we are pleased to see the convergence of our pricing approach with improvement in the commodity markets, based on what we see today, we still have more work to do as cocoa prices remain up over 70% from 2023 levels.

We remain committed to our approach to managing cost inflation through all levers over time. We will also continuously drive productivity to enable investments in our brands and capabilities. In 2026, we plan to increase investments in technology to further strengthen our capabilities across consumer data insights, demand forecasting, commercial investments and supply chain agility.

Turning to salty snacks. Our portfolio is well positioned to help meet consumers' growing desire for permissible and better-for-use snacking options. All three of our brands contributed to the 14% year-over-year increases in retail takeaway in the third quarter, resulting in a share gain of nearly 50 basis points in salty snacks. SkinnyPop, ready-to-eat popcorn and Dot's pretzels are two of the five fastest-growing brands among the top 20 salty brands with retail sales growth of 7% and 13% versus the prior year, respectively.

Moreover, Pirate's Booty retail sales increased 11% year-over-year in the quarter, reflecting strong back-to-school performance, the Pokemon partnership and multipack expansion were part of that. Hu’s is the third largest category in salty snacking and we see significant opportunity for Pirate's Booty to play a bigger role. Next year, we will refresh Pirate's Booty using the playbook we successfully executed to reinvigorate SkinnyPop in 2025. We look forward to sharing more detail in addition to exciting plans for SkinnyPop and ops expansion next quarter.

International segment net sales exceeded expectations, partly due to shipment timing, which we expect to reverse in Q4. Constant currency net sales increased double digits in Brazil and Europe driven by net price realization innovation, distribution gains and media investment behind Reese's.

Global Reese’s net sales increased double digits in Q3, driven by strong brand equity investments and activation, including our Halloween partnership with the Scream movie franchise. In Mexico, we continue to see economic and regulatory challenges impacting overall category growth, which we expect to remain a headwind through at least the first half of 2026.

Despite the environment, Hershey gained share in Mexico chocolate, and we are executing plans to reinvigorate the Spicy Candy portfolio. Our 2025 outlook for the segment remains low single-digit constant currency growth. This implies a deceleration in Q4, which reflects the impact of higher price elasticity, category softness in Mexico and the aforementioned timing of shipments.

Next, turning to our revised full year outlook. Our overall retail takeaway year-to-date, particularly the inflection delivered in Q3 gives us confidence in the underlying trajectory of our business. As such, we are raising our net sales outlook to approximately 3%, up from our prior outlook of at least 2%. We are also raising our full year adjusted EPS guidance to the top half of our prior outlook.

We now anticipate adjusted EPS to decline between 36% and 37% as our strong top line results are offset by higher supply chain costs, unfavorable mix and strategic brand investments. We remain focused on actions that will drive the long-term success of the company and are confident that we will deliver on algorithm top and bottom line growth in 2026.

There is tremendous opportunity for Hershey ahead, and we will remain flexible to invest in areas that we believe will strengthen future growth prospects, while continuing to make progress against our commitment to margin and earnings recovery over time.

I'll now turn it over to Steve to provide you with details on our financial results and outlook for the year.

Thank you, Kirk, and good morning, everyone. Third quarter reported net sales increased 6.5% versus the same period last year. This was ahead of expectations, reflecting strong core performance across all three segments, as well as shipment timing in the International segment.

Organic constant currency net sales growth of 6.2% was driven by net price realization of approximately 6 points along with slight volume growth in the third quarter. Net price realization reflects the combination of pricing announced in 2024 and 2025, and only partially mitigates commodity cost inflation absorbed over the last 2 years.

Volume growth in the quarter was driven by North America salty snacks and the timing of international shipments, mostly offset by the impact of price elasticity in North America confectionery and international. North America confectionery segment net sales increased 5.6% year-over-year. The Sour Strips acquisition was a 40 basis point benefit. Net price realization of approximately 7% primarily reflects the impact of pricing announced in 2024 and with a modest contribution from pricing announced in 2025.

Volume declined approximately 1%, reflecting strong performance in the everyday business and innovation-related shipment timing, which partially offset the impact of price elasticity. North America Salty snacks segment net sales increased 10%. Volume growth of approximately 11% reflects growth across Dot's, SkinnyPop and Pirate's Booty, as well as incrementality from Reese’s filled pretzels and variety multipacks, which more than offset planned reduction in private label production.

Net price realization was down approximately 1%, reflecting the timing of customer programming. International segment net sales and organic constant currency net sales both increased 12.1%. The impact of foreign currency translation during the third quarter was negligible. Net price realization was approximately 7%, reflecting strategic pricing initiatives across key markets. Volume increased around 6%, driven by an approximate 5-point benefit from the timing of shipments, which we expect to reverse in Q4. Excluding this benefit, the volume was above expectations, primarily reflecting strong growth in Brazil, Europe and our global Reese's expansion, which was partially offset by the impact of price elasticity across markets.

Moving down the P&L. Adjusted gross margin of 31.8% decreased 850 basis points year-over-year in the third quarter. Commodity inflation, incremental tariff expenses of approximately $65 million in unfavorable mix were only partially offset by higher volume, net price realization and productivity and transformation program net savings.

Gross margin was higher than expected due to the timing of cocoa hedges and earlier-than-planned net price realization. Advertising and related consumer marketing decreased 5% from the prior year in the quarter. Primarily reflecting reduced agency fees and efficiencies in North America confectionery, which were partially offset by increased investment in the North America salty snacks and International segments.

Adjusted operating expenses, excluding advertising and related consumer marketing expenses, increased 5%, driven by higher incentive compensation and consulting fees, partially offset by transformation program net savings. We remain on track to deliver an incremental $150 million in net savings this year as part of our AAA program to be realized across cost of goods sold and selling, marketing and administrative expenses.

Interest expense was $51 million in the third quarter, in line with expectations. Our full year outlook for interest expense is now approximately $195 million. The adjusted tax rate for the quarter was 26.7%, up from 15.2% last year driven by higher levels of renewable energy tax credits in the prior year period.

We now expect a full year adjusted tax rate of approximately 26% with other expense of approximately $30 million to $35 million. In the third quarter, capital expenditures, including software, were $86 million, $42 million lower than the prior year period as we lap investment in capacity expansion projects that have since concluded. We expect full year capital investments of approximately $425 million reflecting improved visibility to ongoing projects.

Dividends paid to shareholders in Q3 totaled $271 million. The company did not repurchase any shares in the third quarter against our December 2023 $500 million authorization, of which $470 million remains.

Let me summarize our outlook for full year 2025. Based on year-to-date performance and visibility into Q4, we are raising our full year net sales outlook to approximately 3% growth up from at least 2%. Net price realization for the year is expected to be between 5 and 6 points.

Regarding tariffs, we are now modeling tariff expense in the range of $160 million to $170 million, a $10 million reduction, reflecting lower Canadian retaliatory tariffs partly offset by fluctuations in other country-specific rates. Adjusted gross margin is expected to decline approximately 675 to 700 basis points in 2025 in line with our prior outlook as the higher sales outlook and improvement in tariffs are offset by higher supply chain costs, unfavorable mix and strategic brand investments in Q4.

For the fourth quarter, we expect adjusted gross margin to decline more than in Q3 as higher cocoa costs, tariff expense and the timing of hedges are only partially offset by incremental net price realization. Adjusted earnings per share is expected to decline in the range of 36% to 37%, the upper half of our previous range.

Before I turn it back to Kirk, let me touch on cocoa in 2026. On cocoa, we are encouraged to see cocoa financial markets beginning to respond to improving fundamentals. We are optimistic that the recently announced farmer price increases in Ivory Coast and Ghana will further encourage farm investments. This is an important step, together with the industry sustainability commitments, to assuring the long-term supply of cocoa, while enhancing the livelihoods of cocoa farmers in these countries.

Meanwhile, the supply of cocoa from other origins continues to expand. Our robust internal models continue to project a bigger global supply surplus for the '25 and '26 crop than the prior season as global supply returns to the long-term trend and end users continue to adapt to higher prices. The Q3 global grind, a measure of demand was down 13% year-over-year, the tenth straight quarter of mid-single-digit or greater declines.

While cocoa futures have retreated, based on what we know today, we continue to forecast cocoa inflation in 2026. This reflects our robust hedging program, which locked in prices well below the market in 2025 and the coverages we have placed for 2026. If cocoa prices continue to retreat, we are able to participate in some downside, but our overall hedging program is designed to provide visibility and reduce volatility in market prices over time.

While the long-term outlook is brightening, based on what we see today, we will continue to manage through the commodity cost inflation and tariff expenses we've absorbed over the last 2 years, which are not yet fully recovered by recent pricing actions. We recognize that the marketplace will continue to be dynamic and evolving in 2026. Our agile and dedicated team continues to deliver on our key initiatives while supporting investment in our brands and capabilities, which gives us confidence in delivering balanced top and bottom line growth in 2026 and beyond.

I will now turn it back to Kirk for closing remarks.

Thanks, Steve. I'm excited to steer the next generation of growth at the company, working closely with our talented team members, value customers and the Board. Together, we'll focus on delighting consumers and delivering results as we unlock our full potential as a snacking industry leader. I look forward to sharing our strategic plan and vision to further advance Hershey's snacking leadership at our 2026 Investor Day.

Greetings and welcome to The Hershey Company Second Quarter 2025 Question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations for The Hershey Company. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I hope everyone has had the chance to read our press release and listen to our prerecorded management remarks, both of which are available on our website. In addition, we have posted a transcript of the prerecorded remarks. At the conclusion of today's live Q&A session, we will also post a transcript and audio replay of this call.

Please note that during today's Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release and the company's SEC filings.

Finally, please note that we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe will provide useful information for investors. The presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations to the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release.

Joining me today are Hershey's Chairman and CEO, Michele Buck; and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil.

Before turning it over, I would personally like to thank Michele for being an inspiring force. Your clear vision and unwavering dedication to excellence have shaped this company and will continue to motivate us for years to come. So with that, let's get started with the first question. Operator?

Our first question is from Andrew Lazar with Barclays.

Michele, congratulations to you. Best wishes going forward. And congratulations to Kirk as well as he prepares to take the helm in mid-August.

Thank you.

I guess, my question, Michele, is that oftentimes when a new CEO comes in, it can be seen as an opportunity to sort of rebase earnings and margins to set the company up for the next several years, particularly if it's a situation where there's been, let's say, underinvestment. Kirk will obviously come in, get under the hood and make his own determination. But I guess from where you sit, if we put issues like cocoa and tariffs aside, do you see the underlying health of the business as in need of this sort of a reset? And I guess, more importantly, what specifically did you and the Board see in Kirk that made him the right choice?

Sure. So first of all, I'll reiterate, certainly, as Kirk walks in, he'll have the opportunity to form his own opinion. But what I would share is, as you know, Hershey has been a company that has stated our belief in investments in brands and capability over time to consistently ensure that we can drive sustainable growth. And we have proven that we consistently do reinvest during periods of change.

As we got hit by some of the record high cocoa prices early on, we stated that our approach was going to be taking a long-term approach to ensure continued category health, and we've done that. We've continued to spend on our brands, we've invested in technology with our new ERP platform, and then new AI and tech-enabled capabilities that have driven significant efficiency, whether in the transformation program or other places.

On top of that, we're seeing top line momentum on the business. We have our profit recovery plans well underway, and we'll talk more about that today. So as I look at the past 18 months where we've faced headwinds, I then also look at the future where I would say I see more opportunity given the fundamentals of cocoa, the direction that they're headed in, and perhaps even with tariffs. So if I put all of that together, I don't see a need to really reset. I think we've been consistently investing, and we have momentum on our side.

If I look at Kirk and what made him the best candidate. I mean, certainly, Kirk has 3 decades of experience in consumer packaged goods at Pepsi, a leading talent house. He's got very relevant experience in snacking and then also in beverage, which has many corollaries to our business. It's not only an iconic brand business, it's also a pack type business, ubiquitous distribution across channels. So a lot of similarities. He is also very focused on being consumer-centric, customer-centric and the importance of culture in delivering results. So I think all of that and his kind of performance orientation will make him be a great person to continue moving forward our ambition to be a leading snacking powerhouse and continue to deliver sustainable growth.

Great. All right. And then a quick one, Steve. Just it appears at least as a starting point in '25, you're looking for elasticity of roughly 1:1 on the new pricing that was recently announced. Is this a reasonable expectation for '26 as well, at least at this stage, just given the magnitude of the pricing being taken? Or how do you assess elasticity when it's certainly a greater amount of pricing than you've typically taken in a situation like this?

Sure. Yes, as you can imagine, our teams have modeled this exhaustively. And I'd put up our strategic revenue management team against anyone that's very, very thoughtful in the way we've approached this. And overall, the elasticities are probably a little bit more favorable than what we've seen in history. But part of that is because of the breadth. And there are parts, as we know, parts of our portfolio like seasons that are a little bit less elastic. There are other parts more elastic. And so as we set both the pricing assumption and the elasticity assumption, we did that with a very thoughtful modeled approach. Now we'll be watching it closely. But right now, we feel we've got a good beat on how it will play out for this year and next year.

Our next question is from Max Gumport with BNP Paribas.

Michele, congrats as well. I hope you enjoy the retirement. At CAGNY, you observed that if your realized cocoa costs in '26 matched your costs in '24, then you could do $10 plus in adjusted EPS in '26. And I realize we're nowhere near that situation currently, and we also now need to factor in tariffs as well, which were not contemplated in that math. That said, with the announced price increase, it does seem like your pricing will very much close the gap to the total COGS inflation that you have seen in recent years in dollar terms, which with regard to EPS might have an equivalent impact as costs falling back to '24 levels.

And also your comment of the price increase and other initiatives supporting 500 basis points or more of gross margin expansion in '26 before considering partial offsets from cocoa cost and tariffs would support that reasoning as well. So I'm hoping you could provide a bit of a finer point on how to read the impact of this pricing for next year and what it might mean for your P&L specifically if cocoa futures were to hold at current levels. I realize there's a lot in there, but I'm hoping for a bit of an update on that.

Sure. I can definitely give some perspective. So you're right. When we gave that back at CAGNY, talked about $10 and $12 possibilities with assumptions from '25 and '24 carrying forward without inflation. Some things have changed since then, tariffs being the biggest one, right? Tariffs wasn't contemplated at the time of that thinking, and that will continue to be something that we have to work to optimize while also working to see if we can get relief, particularly on the cocoa component of that.

But that aside, this pricing move does make a material impact in the right direction of margin recovery for 2026. It does not, by itself, recover all of the cocoa inflation that we have seen up to 2025. So it's a big step in the right direction, but it's not enough to fully compensate for cocoa inflation up to this point. As we look forward, all of the other levers are going to continue to be important. We talked about, in the prepared remarks, smart complexity. You've seen us take our transformation savings up. We're going to continue to look at all of those levers to extract more cost savings and margin points so that we, over time, do fully recover our margin expectations. But this price increase, while significant, doesn't get us all the way to flat year-over-year.

Now having said that, some things do feel more optimistic than maybe they did even on our last call. Cocoa has come back some. And like everyone, we're trying to be thoughtful as we execute our hedging program and plan for cocoa next year. It is still inflationary from what we know today, but it's taken a step in the right direction. We'll continue to optimize tariffs. But if we could get relief and either tariffs or cocoa reverts back, either one of those could give us a path to something better than on-algorithm earnings for 2026, which is a little bit different than probably we thought in our last conversation.

Great. And then just related to the pricing, how should we think about any need for incremental reinvestment next year to support that price increase and keep the consumer coming into your brands and your franchises?

Yes, into our pricing assumption, Michele touched on this already, we always want to make sure that we're investing back in the brands, that we're investing on competitive events with our customers. We've got a big innovation calendar already planned for next year. We've got some big tentpole events around Olympics and the Hershey movie. And so we feel like those will be fully funded. And of course, we'll be agile when we get into it. And if we do see pressure in some spots or the elasticities are not what we expected, we can revisit.

Our next question is from Megan Clapp with Morgan Stanley.

Congratulations to Michele as well. I wanted to ask about the nonseasonal performance in CMG in the quarter. I think you talked to mid-single-digit growth in the quarter. That's better than we've seen previously, and you still have a lot of activations planned for the second half. And I think you were expecting some incremental shelf space alongside some of those plans in the second half. So maybe, a, you could just expand on what you've seen in that nonseasonal portfolio in the second quarter and what's driving the acceleration? And then, b, how you're thinking about second half growth and kind of the puts and takes?

Sure. So first of all, we're feeling very good about what we're seeing on overall chocolate category growth. And there are really 3 key factors that we think are driving a lot of what we're seeing. First of all, innovation. The consumer has really responded to innovation. As the consumer looks for value, significant innovation makes a difference and delivers value. And there's been a lot of investment in innovation across the category. Secondly, we do know that our products provide emotional well-being and comfort during stressful times. And we've seen some correlations as we look at studies that are out relative to consumers' mindset and emotional well-being and where we're seeing growth tick up in the category.

We also have had some periods where we were lapping some soft comps, and that helped us relative to every day as well. But I think those overall trends tend to be some of the biggest drivers. And then certainly, we also have seen some nice tick up from how we approached instant consumables and some of the choices that we made to really partner with retailers to broaden shelf space and innovation on instant consumables. And we saw some very strong positive results and growth behind those programs. And we think as pricing hits the market that we will only see that growth kind of maintain and become a bit stronger. So we feel really good about what we're seeing. That said, I would say we're not sure that we will see the category stay at the same level of growth that we saw in Q2. Some of the year-on-year comps will get a little bit tougher.

Okay. That's super helpful. And then maybe just a follow-up for Steve to the answer to Max's question. I think you said if relief in tariffs happen or cocoa reverts back, you could get to better than on-algo for '26. So I guess, is it fair to say at this point, you do expect you could deliver on-algo growth versus the updated '25 guide in 2026?

Yes. Based on what we can see today, and again, things like tariffs are rapidly moving. But based on what we can see today, yes, we see on-algorithm earnings growth and top line growth for next year.

Our next question is from Peter Galbo with Bank of America.

Congrats to Michele as well. Michele, maybe I wanted to take the tariff discussion in a little bit of a different direction. I think last quarter, you started hinting at some conversations that you all had been having as it relates to potential exemption. I think the Commerce Secretary even made some comments yesterday about cocoa potentially getting exemption, or at least in his words. So just curious if you can give us an update there in terms of the discussions that you're having and kind of how you've maybe seen that evolve relative to 3 months ago?

Sure. So I would say that we are even more optimistic now. As we've had conversations over the past several months, we have become increasingly comfortable that the government administration understands some of our concerns about the fact that cocoa can only be grown and sourced outside of the U.S. And so we feel good that they really understand that issue broadly, and we have started seeing more commentary -- more publicly addressing that, like the comments that Secretary Lutnick made just yesterday.

And we believe that gives us a lot of optimism. We understand that there are still country negotiations that are underway that have to come to fruition. And so the whole cocoa tariff has to be a broader part of that, but we are optimistic relative to the fact that there are now public statements being made about this issue.

Great. And then if I can actually pivot to Halloween. I think in your prepared comments, again, there was a little bit of maybe a pull forward on shipments from Q3 into Q2. Just want to understand that dynamic. But then also, I believe you had pretty optimistic outlook for Halloween. So I just want to understand kind of what's underlying that view as we get into that season.

Yes. So I wouldn't make too much of those accelerated shipments. We see shifts over the years between when Halloween shifts between Q2 and Q3. That's not uncommon. Some years the customers want to set the category a little bit earlier, and that's actually a good thing for us. We think we also may be seeing a bit of this mid-summer wean in. There's been a social media trend around summer wean, which is earlier Halloween celebrations, which has really somewhat taken off with certain consumer groups. So we know that some customers are focused on that. As we talk to customers, we feel really good that there are plans in place to deliver another strong Halloween in '25. Retailers are definitely excited to set the bar higher this year and continuing to deliver an exciting season for the customers.

Our next question is from Jim Salera with Stephens Inc.

I wanted to shift gears and maybe ask a little bit on the salty snacks piece of the portfolio, because salty as a category has been pressured this year. And yet it seems like you guys are seeing strength in both Dot's and SkinnyPop, which I think play in kind of different value propositions, one obviously more better for you, one more indulgent. Can you just speak to what you're seeing there that's allowing you to deliver kind of above category trends? And then maybe speak to any opportunities to increase multi-back distribution because that's something you guys called out in the prepared remarks.

Yes. So first of all, both Dot's -- pretty much our entire portfolio in salty snacks does have a permissible and premium halo. Popcorn, clearly, SkinnyPop is pretty obvious. But as you think about pretzels, pretzels are perceived as better for you than many other salty snacks. So even Dot's has a bit of that permissibility halo. Across those businesses, we just continue to see strong consumer acceptance and momentum. As we bought those businesses, they were relatively nascent. So continue to have upside in driving household penetration, just getting more consumers to be aware of the brands, continued opportunities to gain distribution.

And now we've really dialed up the marketing with new packaging on SkinnyPop, our Jennifer Aniston program, exclusive flavors on Dot's like Buffalo that have generated a lot of consumer interest and fit into some important tentpole events around sports and football. And then price pack architecture has been another opportunity of just continuing to fill out all the sizes and price points. So between flavor innovation, price pack architecture, engaging with the consumer, there just continues to be momentum. And we've also launched some innovation that is kind of between the seams of some of our categories.

So for example, Reese's peanut butter filled pretzels, which has recently hit the market, which is a phenomenal product that leverages our sweet and salty together. And then you hit multipacks, and I'd say that's just another lever of growth. Frankly, multipacks are of significant size in salty snacks, and we're really filling out our portfolio there, both in terms of single items as well as leveraging the breadth of our portfolio to deliver. So we're continuing to expand the SKUs in that space and gain more distribution there.

Great. And maybe just one more thought on multipacks. Are you able to leverage some of the innovations that you have and kind of package that together in sort of kind of an innovation-centric multipack offering that would highlight some of the different innovations you have across the portfolio and make that a little bit more front and center and maybe allow the consumer to kind of try all your innovations in one package?

Yes, we certainly can combine across the portfolio. For example, we've done a Reese's one that we put together that included our Reese's animal crackers, our Reese's filled pretzels. So yes, we're doing a lot of consumer insight work to optimize what are the most compelling combinations across our portfolio. And we've really just gotten some of these multipacks into the market. So this is an area where there's a lot of upside ahead of us.

Our next question is from Robert Moskow with TD Cowen.

And I just want to extend my congratulations to you, Michele, for such a great track record and creating so much value at Hershey over the years. I wish you the best. And I wanted to ask, though, about the instant consumable part of the business. I think you say in the press release -- or the transcript that everyday chocolate as a category was up 6.7%. Your everyday chocolate is up less than that. And I wanted to know how you would gauge your competitiveness in that segment of the market right now. I thought this is the part where you felt like you had more work to do. Are you seeing any improvement?

And then one extra thing. I think you said that you thought that the category growth rate may not be as strong in the back half because of comparisons. Can you be more specific what those comparisons were? I don't recall from last year.

Yes. So I'll start on instant consumables. We do feel like we have made progress there, and our numbers demonstrate that in instant consumable, we are now gaining share and growing ahead of the category. We feel good about the actions we put in place relative to partnering on our gold standard planograms, which enabled us to expand distribution, get more breadth of our portfolio on the shelves to make the shelves even more productive. And we think that, that will continue going forward. So we feel good about the program that we committed to and executed in the first half of the year.

Take-home is where we have seen some pressure. That's where we've had more pressure on the business, particularly from private label and some of the better-for-you and insurgent brands. And it's one of the reasons that as we launched Oreo, we're really focusing on take-home because we believe innovation is what's really needed to capture shelf space and to capture the consumers' mind share of the take-home set.

Relative to year-on-year comparisons, the comparisons are particularly tough in Q4, as that's when we really started to ramp up our big innovation for '25 at the end of '24. So that's really what's driving that lap.

Our next question is from Alexia Howard with Bernstein.

Congratulations, Michele. Wishing you all the best for your retirement. And welcome to Kirk. First question, could you talk about the pace of innovation and how it stepped up over the last couple of years? It feels as though you're really firing on all cylinders now. And I'm wondering if you're able to quantify exactly how things have stepped up? And are you at the pace that you would like to be after maybe a quieter period during COVID and the global supply chain reductions?

Yes. So you're absolutely right about that. We have dialed up our innovation. We measure our innovation as a percent of net sales and try and target where we think we need to be to really fully leverage that innovation without overleveraging innovation at the expense of the core, because we know the core is highly profitable and want to make sure we're focused on that. Our levels are up significantly versus 2019. What we're seeing in the category, frankly, is a little bit more innovation is absolutely necessary in order to compete, particularly for shelf space, with some of the insurgent brands and also private label. And innovation is also perceived as value from the consumers who are looking for value.

So I do think that we've done a really nice job of getting to a good stride as we look to '26, and also getting innovations out there that we do think can really play a sustainable role in the category. If you think about the innovation that we've put forth in sweets, around Jolly Rancher Ropes, Freeze Dried, the Shaq brand, our M&A in Sour Strips, really strategic in terms of hitting new consumers and new occasions. And then also some really big innovation such as the Oreo one that we announced that we think gives us a good blend of news, incrementality and disruption.

Great. And as a follow-up, it seems to me that there may be some incremental headwinds to consumer demand in indulgent snacking as we enter 2026, the GLP-1 pill version coming out, potential SNAP benefit reduction at the individual state level in terms of what SNAP can be spent on and soda and candy maybe coming out of that. How are you thinking about that as a potential impact next year? Obviously, the innovation, the marketing are obviously going to counter that. But is that something that we should be factoring in?

Yes. So I'd say, first of all, relative to GLP-1s, we continue to see no material impact in '25. Certainly, we are always monitoring very closely. But at this point, we're not expecting it to be significant in '26. We broadly look at the consumer trend as it relates to health and wellness. As you know, there's been, over time, a continuous pressure of consumers being more and more interested in products that have those types of benefits. And as well, we always watch kind of the national conversation around health and how that may evolve and change anything. So we're closely monitoring that to make sure our portfolio has offerings that appeal to all consumers' desires.

As it relates to SNAP, the way that the rollout is slated, we aren't expecting material impact in '26 and '27. Frankly, given the choice of reducing SNAP or removing CMG, we're less concerned with removing CMG, because it does still give the consumer SNAP dollars to fund their groceries, but they can also choose to spend on confection. As we look beyond '27, it is something that we are monitoring to factor into our planning.

Our next question is from Leah Jordan with Goldman Sachs.

Just wanted to go back to the pricing discussion, see if you can help us understand the phasing of the pricing actions you're making in the back half and into '26. And I guess, ultimately, why does taking this magnitude of pricing make sense now given the assumption for 1% elasticity as it's often just better to keep people in the category versus trying to win them back later?

I mean, I'll start and throw it over to you. So certainly, I think pricing makes sense as we look at the continuous pressures that we've had from cocoa pricing on our P&L. We are committed to margin recovery and pricing to cover inflation over time. So that is part of our long-term strategy. We've said all along we were going to watch prices. And certainly, if we could delay taking an increase, do so, but we think that's important.

We also believe we're still delivering, and we know we're still delivering compelling value across our portfolio. Over 75% of our items are under the $4 price point. And frankly, we're in pretty good shape on that as we look at where we are relative to the other snacking options in the marketplace. As we think about 2025, in particular, in terms of impact of pricing, if you think about the rest of the year, we have about 40% of our second half orders that aren't impacted by pricing, given the predominance of seasons in the back half. So between seasons and then also the support behind Oreo and the momentum there, we're not going to get as full an impact in the back half.

Steve, I don't know if you want to talk about anything more broadly going forward.

Yes. I would just say that for this year, the impact is about 2 points to the enterprise on the top line. And then obviously, most of that is going to be in the fourth quarter. And then as we look to next year, it's more mid-teens impact. About 80% of the profit benefit will happen in '26, with a little bit of flow-through to '27 on seasons. And the first season to be impacted will be Easter '26. So hopefully, that gives you some idea of the profile.

The other thing I would just add is we view pricing as a strategic way to allow us to continue to invest in our brands and to drive the long-term health of the category with new capabilities, et cetera.

Our next question is from David Palmer with Evercore ISI.

Congrats, Michele. And also congrats to Kirk, and welcome. A quick follow-up on the pricing. Does that mid-teens pricing, is that inclusive of tariff-related pricing? I'm assuming so. And if so, what happens if we do see that exemption from cocoa in the near term? Does that get adjusted? How should we think about that? And I have a follow-up.

Sure. Yes. Just to be crystal clear, the pricing has nothing to do with tariffs. This is strictly a catch-up on cocoa component. And as we said, we're not fully caught up even on the '25 inflation yet.

All right. So are you currently having discussions where you're talking about 2 different levels if we see -- I mean, is there a dual track discussion happening on that through year-end? Because I would imagine there's one window. So how are you thinking about that?

Yes. I think it's too early. This is now in the market. As we talked about earlier, we want to make sure we execute this with excellence, see what the elasticities look like, and then see what happens. We said we have some optimism relative to tariffs going forward, particularly on cocoa, and we'll continue to watch the cocoa markets, but too early to think about that next step.

And you mentioned 80% of that would flow through next year in the previous answer. If we just were to back up and just look at that North American confectionery price mix flow through in '26, what sort of flow-through should we be expecting from that level of pricing in '26?

I think we're going to begin to see mid-teens. Again, overall for U.S. CMD, we'll start from the first quarter. And then obviously, as we talked about with Easter being the first season, there will be a pretty quick start with the new pricing next year for that business.

Got it. So we should be expecting double-digit price mix to be flowing through in '26, starting in '26?

That's right. Yes.

Our next question is from Michael Lavery with Piper Sandler.

Congrats as well, Michele. Just wanted to come back to the color you gave on the 2026 gross margin recovery. Can you give a sense -- you've talked about how it reflects the pricing and the cost savings. But can you give a sense of what assumptions that reflects for cocoa and maybe how much you're already covered for 2026 at this point as well?

Sure. Yes, we won't share specifics on coverage for 2026 other than to say our policy hasn't changed. We continue to follow our policy. We still have an expectation, as we talked about, that cocoa is ultimately going to come down. So we're factoring that into our thinking around coverage and the structures that we're using to hedge. But we are still, based on what we see today, seeing inflationary cocoa for '26. And again, part of that's based on some of the hedging benefits that we carried into '25 and off that base into 2026. Now we'll watch closely what happens with cocoa in the balance of the year, and that could move around. But right now, we're expecting it to be inflationary.

Okay. That's helpful. And just as far as a follow-up on the tariff mitigation. You mentioned you're not obviously pricing for that yet. You said that you will mitigate your tariff exposure over time if they endure. Is that just pricing? Or do you have other levers? What do those plans look like?

Yes. Right now, we're focused on what we can do in the supply chain. We've got the benefit of a very agile supply chain. We've invested a lot in agility, automation, a lot of cross-border opportunities. And so we're going to continue to optimize the supply chain part of this. We've done some of that already. I will say for this year, the impact is relatively small. But as we go forward, that's going to be, I'll say, the principal focus until we see what happens with tariffs long term.

Would that be just a different country of origin shift? Or what supply chain flexibility is there to impact the tariffs?

Yes. I mean there are impacts of where we manufacture. We've got capacity here in the U.S. for some things. It's a mix of what we in-source, outsource, and what countries that is located in. So it's sort of all of those things.

Our next question is from Scott Marks with Jefferies.

Again, congrats, Michele, on a great career. And congrats to Kirk coming in and taking over. I wanted to ask a little bit about the cocoa supply dynamics. You made some comments in the prepared remarks around some investments in new origins. You made some comments about Ivory Coast seeing an increase in fertilizer usage. So just wondering, as we think about maybe the go-forward supply, how much recoveries may be expected to come from that West Africa region relative to how much is expected to come from sources outside of the West Africa region?

Sure. I mean, as we talked about, I think overall, we feel there are good signs on the cocoa market, some of which we're seeing now and some we expect. You saw data recently that grinds have come down substantially sort of high single digits and could be heading lower. Butter ratios have come down from their peak, suggesting some inventory building there potentially. The current crop, we continue to expect a modest surplus and see next year's main crop looking quite strong. So I'd say all of those feel good at this point. As we talked about in the prepared remarks, we're seeing more fertilizer use, some better agriculture practices as it's more profitable to farm cocoa.

And then to your question, I think we're going to continue to see the origins outside of West Africa continue to invest and play a larger role. Of course, we've been pivoting into that space already as many others have as well. And I think those other origins have responded by investing more and kind of picking up some of that mantle of a bigger role. We also have seen more recently speculators have reduced positions and so forth. So I think we can get to a potential larger surplus without further recovery in West Africa and new origins growing double digits and demand continues to decline. So I think we could see more of a fall in the second half.

Got it. Appreciate the answer on that. And then last one for me. Just you made some comments about convenience stores, obviously, traffic still being down, but you were still able to grow parts of your instant consumables business there. Just wondering, as you think about maybe the go forward in C-store, what kind of response have you had from convenience retailers in terms of some of your new initiatives and innovations? And how are you thinking about the outlook for that space?

Yes. I mean we've had very strong results from the retailers relative to those new initiatives. As we shared in the script, some of the gold standard planogram has certainly resulted in significant category growth for retailers. And we always go to the retailers with programs that we believe will not only grow our own business, but will actually grow their category, because that's a win-win for both of us. And we know that we've seen significant high single-digit growth in the categories where we've put those plans into place. So there's a lot of momentum with the programming in place.

On top of the momentum we already have, we have innovation coming in the second half, which should further advance the momentum and growth that we're seeing on the portfolio there. So even if there are continued declines in trips, I think what we feel good about is that we've been able to still drive our business and drive conversion despite where trips are.

Our next question is from Chris Carey with Wells Fargo Securities.

One quick modeling question, then something more strategic. On the modeling dynamic, which, well, just has an impact on your model, the tax rate coming up for the year, some evolution of tax credits. Steve, is that a permanent dynamic going forward? Or is that unique to the year? Just maybe a couple of sound bites on what drove that evolution and how durable it is? And then I have a follow-up.

Sure. Yes, happy to take that one. The tax has been a challenge. We talked about it in the first quarter call as well. And I think as we get to this point in the year, it's been even more of a challenge. It's very hard to say what is, in the tax world, as much as changing right now, what is permanent. And so I can talk about what's happening now and how we think about it for '26 a little bit.

But the biggest factors right now are a couple of things. One is, we've talked about before, our teams are being very creative in areas like cocoa sourcing and procurement. And those drive a great ROI for the company, but there are some tax consequences relative to our overall rate that are a bit dilutive. So that's one factor. And I would think about that as -- I don't know that I'd say it's sticky, but it's certainly a piece for this year, and I would imagine we'll see some of that next year.

A second piece, and you mentioned the tax credit strategy. The tax credit strategy is impacted by 2 things. One is our income is lower. And so there are limits on how much tax credit availability we have with that income level. And second, with all the change in the world of tax right now, some of the returns we're seeing on tax credits just aren't up to the standard that we look for when we pick those investments. And I would see that as also being sticky. I think in the near term, there's not going to be a big change. And that's why you see the dial down between other income and expense and the tax rate kind of going in the opposite direction. And all of those together probably give us a 250 basis point headwind on economic tax rate right now that I would expect to carry forward into 2026. So that's the way I think. Beyond that, it's difficult to say. I mean, this is an area that's still evolving pretty quickly.

Okay. Very helpful. Regarding 2026, it's a bit of a multilayered question, so apologies, but you have these great initiatives in place that are going to give you what sounds like a gross 500 basis point benefit to gross margin. When you think about the offsets which would get you in that sort of algorithm earnings growth next year, is there a way to frame how much you're thinking about that, which is tariffs relative to lingering cocoa inflation relative to the pricing that you're taking?

And then just connected to that, one of your peers reported last night, and we're seeing some, I guess, impact some months forward of more substantial pricing, which has been taken in Europe, and some of the elasticities, which are starting to emerge. Are you able to leverage those pricing actions in market and the volume impacts that we're beginning to see from an elasticity standpoint to, I guess, better serve you as you think about your own elasticities ahead of this kind of like substantial and appropriate price increase going into next year? So thanks for the gross margin and elasticity. I appreciate it.

Sure. Well, maybe helpful on the EPS side, taking the first part of your question and just kind of walk through some of the puts and takes on '26 EPS. And again, kind of starting to say we can see a path now to being on-algorithm. And if a few things were to break, potential for more than that. But if I just step back on EPS, obviously, we're going to have pricing coming through next year. We're going to have increased productivity and higher transformation savings. That was one of the things we called out on the call this morning.

We'll see some greater scale in our core brands. So this is part of that smart complexity initiative that we referenced, being very thoughtful about how we leverage the core and drive the core. And that also leads to some margin accretion. And then we'll continue to press on tariffs relative to the cocoa exemption, and that's sort of out of our control, but continue to lean there.

As we talked about on the last question, tax is going to remain high. So I don't see that being any better next year. I probably look at that as a push to next year. And then on the other side, the delta, obviously, we talked about incremental cocoa inflation. Elasticities, we'll see what we're going to see there. But along with those elasticities, we'll have some absorption impact into the P&L. That is factored into our outlook in that 500 basis points, but that's something we have to account for. And then tariffs can also be a negative if they would happen to go the other way. So those are the kind of big moving pieces inside the puts and takes.

On the elasticity question, I think right now, we want to see how our assumptions in the market play out here. And like I talked about, I think, in an earlier question, we'll pivot if we need to, if we see something concerning on elasticities. We're investing behind our brands, strong innovation agenda. So everything is in place to make this a success, working closely with our customers, but we'll remain agile as we see this in the market.

Yes. I mean at the highest level, I think Steve said this before, but we feel good about being on-algorithm for '26. And as we look at the puts and takes in the marketplace, we think that there are multiple paths to us seeing EPS be well into that double-digit range, pending what happens with tariffs and cocoa costs, which, of course, are the 2 biggest factors. That is with current cocoa and tariffs as they are that we achieved that on-algo.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Naughton for closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining us this morning, and we look forward to connecting over the coming days.

Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.

Good morning and welcome to the prerecorded discussion of the Hershey Company's Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Results. I'm Anoori Naughton, Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Hershey's Chairman and CEO, Michele Buck; and Hershey's Senior Vice President and CFO, Steve Voskuil. In addition to these remarks, we will host an analyst Q&A-only session at 8:15 a.m. Eastern on the morning of July 30. A replay of this webcast and our subsequent Q&A session will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website, along with their corresponding transcripts.

During the course of today's discussion, management will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These statements include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operations and financial performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements based on subsequent events. A detailed listing of such risks and uncertainties can be found in today's press release and the company's SEC filings.

Finally, please note that during today's discussion, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe will provide useful information for investors. The presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations to the GAAP results are included in this morning's press release. For certain forward-looking non-GAAP measures, including adjusted gross margin, reconciliations are not provided because the company is unable to provide such reconciliations without unreasonable efforts.

It is now my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and CEO, Michele Buck.

Thank you, Anoori, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As you know, in January, I announced my intention to retire from The Hershey Company after 9 years as CEO and more than 20 years with the company. Before discussing our results today, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the exciting news that Kirk Tanner has been appointed as Hershey's next President and CEO. The Kirk brings over 30 years of experience in the industry, and I am confident that he is the right person to lead Hershey and continue advancing our ambition to be a leading snacking powerhouse. He will start on August 18, and I will transition to an advisory role to ensure a smooth handover and continued execution of Hershey's strategic priorities. I want to extend my sincere congratulations to Kirk, and I look forward to Hershey's future under his leadership. Now on to results.

We are pleased with our second quarter results and the momentum that we are seeing in our business. Investments in our brand and impactful innovation, combined with effective execution, are enabling solid consumption and share gains across both our U.S. confection and salty snacking businesses. I would like to thank our people across the business for their relentless focus and efforts in executing our plans and delivering this strong quarter. Our capable leadership team continues to make strong decisions and execute with excellence to advance the business.

Looking ahead, we remain committed to delivering balanced growth and we have taken pivotal steps towards mitigating cocoa inflation through enhanced productivity, technology-enabled efficiency and speed and strategic pricing, which we will talk about in a few moments. First half net sales growth of 1.7%, which smooths the impact of ERP-related inventory lapse and the timing of Easter exceeded our expectations driven by strong performance in our North America confectionery and North America salt snacking segments. As expected, the late Easter favorably impacted retail trends in the quarter. Hershey candy, mint and gum U.S. retail sales increased 21.8% versus the category increase of 17.9% in the 12 weeks ended June 29. This resulted in a share gain of approximately 90 basis points, slightly ahead of our outlook. Category growth in nonseasonal candy mint and gum continued to outpace broader U.S. snacking trend in the quarter.

Everyday chocolate retail takeaway accelerated to 6.7%, the highest level of [indiscernible] since mid-2023. This reflects the continued relevance of the category in consumers' daily lives. Consumers eating more chocolate during stressful periods and a strong response to robust category news and innovation. Hershey nonseasonal candy mint and gum retail takeaway of 4.7% in the quarter outpaced the category as we built momentum on a strong base of innovation and programs. Growth was balanced across the portfolio with instant consumable chocolate up 2.7%, take-home chocolate of 4.6% and refreshment, up 3%. Our expanding suites portfolio delivered 14.8% growth, up from 10.4% in Q1 and 3.7% in 2024, resulting in approximately 110 basis points of share gains. Our strategy is to reinvigorate instant consumable chocolate are demonstrating results. Hershey's takeaway and the convenience channel achieved a 2% growth rate despite a decline in in-store trips. We gained 60 basis points of share in the channel behind strong execution, innovation and incremental merchandising. Consumption was strong across our top chocolate franchises with Reese growth of 4%, Hershey, up nearly 8% and KitKat, up 3% in the quarter behind our summer limited edition programs and media campaigns. Takeaway for our variety business also increased 2% with solid results from Cadbury, Whoppers, York and Heath.

Our Q2 results are proof that we are making progress against key initiatives, and we have exciting plans to continue building momentum into the second half. We alluded to some of these product launches and collaborations last quarter, and I'm pleased to share an update across key programs. Our gold standard planogram principles are resonating, driving tremendous results, where they have been implemented. The improved shopability, space allocation and placement are driving higher conversion and our lifting category results. For example, 2 major customers recently moved to the gold standard take-home planograms and saw 8% category growth on average in the following 2 months. This was well ahead of national trends and led to a 40 basis point share gain for those customers.

Our category content will continue to deliver results for retailers and the category as we reach adoption in 60% of convenience stores this year, an increase from 50% to over 60% in take-home isles with renewed sell-in effort ahead of spring '26 planograms. The Pokémon program is off to a fantastic start. Pokémon Kisses velocities are 3x those of select other limited time offers in the market, showing the power of both the product and the partnership. Earned media impressions have already reached $2.2 billion with an overwhelming positive net sentiment score of 98%. The collectible nature of the packaging is driving strong consumer engagement and repeat purchases and generating enthusiasm for the back-to-school season. Our robust suite products pipeline continues this fall as we bring more of Shaquille O’Neal’s life into the gummy form. This time, we are bringing his very own sneakers into the SHAQ-A-LICIOUS XL gummies in 3 popular flavors: strawberry, lime and mango. We will support this innovation with an experiential marketing campaign with strong cultural relevance, including dropping an actual sneaker in all gummy colors. More excitement will follow with the launch of a new multi-texture product later this year as we continue to strategically advance our presence in the suites market. Lastly, we are introducing our biggest Reese's brand innovation yet. America's #1 candy and the #1 cookie are coming together in an iconic collaboration that consumers have been asking us for, Reese's Oreo Cup. You will see more news later today as we officially launch the collaboration. This powerhouse brand partnership will drive trial and repeat via joint displays and media activation. A meaningful portion of the launch will be in take-home pack types, a pivot from prior introductions as we focus on capturing share in high-growth channels. We also expect to build on last year's seasonal success with solid performance in Halloween and holiday. With these programs, we remain confident in our plans for full year share gains.

Turning to salty snacks. Our portfolio led in share gains among the top 10 salty snack manufacturers this quarter as our brands continue to resonate with consumers' desire for permissible and better-for-you brands. SkinnyPop consumption increased 4% in the quarter, delivering a ready-to-eat popcorn share gain of approximately 50 basis points, driven by our new packaging, Jennifer Aniston media campaign and Avocado & Lime and Harry Potter Butterbeer flavor innovations. Dot's growth outpaced our expectations with retail takeaway up 13%. This resulted in over 200 basis points of share gains in pretzels, driven by the barbecue flavor innovation and summer activations. Sweet and Salty continues to be a white space opportunity, with Reese filled pretzels seeing strong initial velocities. Our salty variety pack retail takeaway also increased 32%, driven by innovation and distribution gains. We expect momentum to build in Q3 for our Salty portfolio, supported by media investment, a robust promotional calendar flavor innovation and product rotations, like Dot's Buffalo that will serve as the perfect anchor for our Fall Football programming.

Net sales trends within our International segment were below expectations in the quarter, reflecting unfavorable currency translation, softer category growth in Mexico, and reduced export demand. In Mexico, despite economic challenges and changes in regulation impacting overall chocolate category growth, Hershey continued to gain market share. Constant currency net sales increased double digits in Brazil, driven by a robust Easter and favorable category dynamics and mid-single digits in Europe, led by the U.K. We are executing our playbook to turn our biggest brand REIT into a global juggernaut with first half international growth of nearly 8%. We expect Reese acceleration in the second half, supported by wire distribution, media activation and a new Halloween partnership with the Scream movie franchise. For the International segment, our full year constant currency segment net sales growth outlook remains low single digits.

Now for our revised full year outlook. We are confident in the underlying trajectory of our business. Our retail takeaway and overall execution are delivering robust results. which we expect to continue in the second half. Moreover, we have strong visibility into second half shipments with nearly 40% tied to seasons and new items with strong retailer support. Our full year adjusted EPS guidance is now expected to decline between 36% and 38%, reflecting strong first half results incremental pricing and the successful execution of cocoa procurement strategies, which are more than offset by the impact of higher taxes and current tariff policy. Without tariffs, we would have raised our full year adjusted EPS outlook. Our updated guidance fully reflects the risk from tax and tariff fluctuations based on what we know today.

Let me turn to cocoa, our recent price increase and the other initiatives we are implementing to drive balanced growth as we look ahead. First, though cocoa prices have retreated year-to-date, they remain volatile and significantly elevated versus history. Based on what we know today, we continue to anticipate inflation in our cocoa input costs year-over-year in 2026. This is due to our robust hedging practices, which locked in 2025 prices well below the market. modest improvement in our cost outlook for the year through execution of innovative sourcing and hedging strategies and forward visibility from hedges we have begun to place for 2026. Our flexible hedging strategies would allow us to participate if cocoa markets retreat further in 2025, and we continue to use similar strategies in our approach to 2026 hedges.

Coal market fundamentals remain encouraging. The data continues to support a modest global supply surplus from a '24, '25 crop as the top 3 global cocoa markets track to a double-digit increase in supply this season. There has been considerable investment from top and new origins over the past several years. In the Ivory Coast, reports indicate fertilizer usage has reached its highest level in at least 5 years, which should support crop development. Early pod counts suggest that the 2025, 2026 crop season is off to a strong start. Our robust internal models are projecting a larger global surplus for the '25, '26 crop as supply normalizes and end users continue to take steps to adapt to persistently high prices. While we remain hopeful, we have not yet seen the progress in fundamentals translate to significant improvement in the cocoa financial markets. As such, we have put into action our plans to address the commodity inflation we have absorbed in our P&L over the past 2 years.

This month, Hershey announced a new price action on the entirety of our U.S. confection portfolio. These products represent roughly 80% of total net sales and through a combination of list price and price pack architecture, we will deliver an estimated 16 points of pricing contribution to the overall company. Consistent with previous practices, we will have a transition period for our retailers to adjust to these new prices, and we will protect key promotional events and important tent poles for our customers and consumers who relied on Hershey's diverse portfolio of snacking options to celebrate life's moments, big and small. Our teams have been strategic and thoughtful about our relative value within our categories and broader consumption occasions. Over 75% of items in our portfolio remain under $4. This action is projected to benefit adjusted gross margin with no significant effect on sales anticipated for 2025.

This pricing announcement reinforces our commitment to covering commodity inflation with pricing over time. We are also implementing an initiative called Smart Complexity, to simplify packaging and product assortments and optimize manufacturing efficiency to drive savings for Hershey and our customers. This project enables us to raise our advancing automation and agility transformation program savings target to $400 million from $350 million as our teams accelerate a strong pipeline of opportunity, including smart complexity to drive automation and efficiency, leveraging our technology investments.

We are taking significant steps to address cocoa inflation and restore our advantaged margin structure while continuing to support investments in our brands and capabilities to take the business to the next level. In aggregate, the initiatives discussed today would restore adjusted gross margins by over 500 basis points in 2026. Although current market conditions suggest that increased cocoa costs and tariffs may partially offset these efforts. We are confident we are taking the right actions to deliver sustainable top and bottom line growth in 2026 and long term.

I'll now turn it over to Steve, who will provide you with details on our financial results and outlook for the year.

Thank you, Michele, and good morning, everyone. Second quarter net sales results were slightly ahead of expectations, driven by strong results in North America confectionery and North America salty snacks, partially offset by lower-than-expected results in international.

Reported net sales increased 26% versus the same period last year. Organic constant currency net sales growth of 26.3% and was driven by net price realization of approximately 5 points and volume growth of approximately 21 points. Volume growth in the quarter was impacted by the lap of planned inventory decreases after our ERP system implementation in the prior year period, a later Easter season in 2025 and customers requesting earlier shipment of Halloween orders versus the prior year.

North America confectionery segment net sales growth of 32% was ahead of expectations. The Sour Strips acquisition was a 60 basis point benefit and foreign currency exchange was a 20 basis point headwind. Net price realization of approximately 6% reflects the impact of pricing announced in 2024. Volume increased 25%, of which approximately 13 points was lapping inventory changes related to the ERP system implementation in the prior year. The balance reflects the benefit of Easter timing in 2025, and an approximate 2 to 3-point benefit from customers requesting earlier delivery of Halloween orders versus prior year, partially offset by pricing elasticity.

Net sales for our North America Salty snacks segment increased 8.8%. Volume growth of over 4% reflects growth across Dot's and SkinnyPop, and incrementality from variety multipacks and Reese filled pretzels, which more than offset a planned reduction in private label production. Net price realization increased nearly 5%, driven by the timing of promotional investments and the lap of onetime expenses related to our route-to-market transition in Q2 of 2024.

International segment net sales increased 4.4% in the second quarter. Foreign currency translation represented an approximate 6-point headwind. Organic constant currency net sales increased 10%. Volume increased around 9 points, driven by an approximate 10-point volume benefit from lapping inventory shifts related to the ERP system implementation last year. Excluding this dynamic, Volume was below our expectations, primarily reflecting category softness in Mexico and lower export market demand. Net price realization of around 1% was also below expectations reflecting higher trade promotion and unfavorable mix.

Moving down the P&L. Adjusted gross margin of 38.1% decreased 510 basis points in the second quarter as commodity inflation and $2 million of incremental tariff expenses were only partially offset by higher volume, net price realization, productivity and transformation program net savings. Gross margin was higher than expected due to the timing of cocoa hedges, higher volume leverage and lower tariff expenses than anticipated in the quarter.

Advertising and related consumer marketing increased 35.5% in the second quarter, reflecting the timing of expenses in North America confectionery and International segments in the prior year. Adjusted operating expenses, excluding advertising and related consumer marketing spend increased 2.2%. This was driven by higher incentive compensation expenses partially offset by fewer technology investments related to the ERP system upgrade and transformation program net savings.

As Michele mentioned, we are raising the outlook for our Triple A initiative for the year and for the full program. We now expect to deliver $150 million in net savings this year, up from $125 million to be realized as cost of goods sold and selling, marketing and administrative expenses. We are also raising our 3-year program target to $400 million, up from $350 million as we advance a strong pipeline of opportunities to drive organizational efficiency and speed through technology.

Interest expense was $46 million in the second quarter. Our full year outlook for interest expense is now approximately $200 million, which reflects higher leverage versus our prior outlook. The adjusted tax rate for the quarter was 32.8%, an increase of 840 basis points versus last year, driven by incremental non-U.S. tax reserves. We expect other expenses of approximately $75 million to $80 million and a full year adjusted tax rate of approximately 24%. The increase in effective tax rate is due to changes in the global tax landscape, which have affected the execution of our tax strategies.

Adjusted earnings per share declined 4.7% year-over-year as incremental commodity costs and a higher tax rate more than offset the benefit from volume growth productivity and transformation program cost savings. In the second quarter, capital expenditures, including software, were $231 million, $113 million lower than the prior year period as several capacity and technology projects have concluded. We continue to expect full year capital investments of between $425 million and $450 million.

Dividends paid to shareholders in Q2 totaled $271 million. The company did not repurchase any shares in the second quarter against our December 2023 $500 million authorization, of which $470 million remains. We are prioritizing capital for the acquisition of Fulfill North America and the pending acquisition of LesserEvil, and therefore, do not expect to repurchase shares this year. We continue to expect the LesserEvil acquisition to close later this year.

To summarize our updated outlook for the full year, there is no change to our net sales outlook of at least 2% growth. Net sales growth in the first half, which smooths the ERP lapse and Easter timing increased 1.7%. We are seeing positive momentum in our category, and we expect an acceleration in our performance in the second half to 2% to 4% growth with improvement across segments behind strong innovation, merchandising plans and seasonal contribution. Full year net price realization is expected to be approximately 5 points, reflecting contribution from our August 2024 and July 2025, pricing actions.

Regarding tariffs, the global business environment remains dynamic as trade negotiations continue. For the full year, we are now modeling tariff expense in the range of $170 million to $180 million, below our prior expectations due to inventory on hand, fluctuations in country-specific rates and sourcing optimization. Given the unique circumstances surrounding cocoa, which cannot be grown in the United States, we remain hopeful that tariffs on our largest exposure will improve as trade negotiations continue, though this will likely take time. We are not planning for relief in 2025 and have fully embedded these incremental costs in our full year outlook. We will mitigate our tariff exposures over time if they endure and already have a robust plan underway.

Adjusted gross margin is expected to decline approximately 675 to 700 basis points in 2025. This is at the high end of our prior outlook due to the inclusion of tariffs in the second half, which more than offset the benefit from our recently announced U.S. confection pricing action, incremental cost savings through our transformation program and favorability from our cocoa sourcing and hedging strategies.

Adjusted earnings per share is expected to decline in the range of 36% to 38% for the year. For the third quarter, we anticipate adjusted earnings per share to decline sequentially from Q2, reflecting the impact of higher cocoa cost in the second half, incremental tariff expenses, continued strong brand investment and a higher interest expense and tax rate year-over-year.

We continue to deliver strong progress across our key growth initiatives and remain confident in our outlook for top line acceleration. Although higher hedged cocoa costs and the recent implementation of tariffs are expected to create additional earnings pressure through the remainder of 2025. We will continue to drive productivity improvements and cost efficiencies. We are also taking appropriate action in response to cocoa inflation to restore margins over time and support ongoing investment in our brands and capabilities positioning the company for balanced growth as we look ahead to 2026.

Before concluding, I would like to take a moment to express my personal gratitude to Michele. Your unwavering vision of expanding, innovating and diversifying our business has been a cornerstone of our success. Under your leadership, Hershey has transformed into the resilient multi-category snacking leader that we are today. Your commitment to excellence and strategic growth has left an enduring mark on our organization. and we'll continue to prioritize those values as we reach new heights in our business going forward. We wish you all the best in your next chapter and look forward to building upon the strong foundation you have established.

Thank you, Steve. As I reflect on my over 20-year career at Hershey and 9 years as CEO, I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished during a time of tremendous change for our industry. We pushed ourselves to evolve and grow alongside our consumers and establish ourselves as a leading snacking powerhouse while honoring our incredible history and confection. We made strategic acquisitions like SkinnyPop, One Brands and Dot's Pretzels to diversify our offerings and respond to changing consumer preferences. And we've invested heavily in our digital infrastructure and capabilities, increasing our agility and efficiency.

Leading this iconic company has been the pinnacle of my career and highlight of my life. To the incredible Hershey organization, thank you for your dedication to our mission and your commitment to excellence. To my executive team, thank you for your relentless focus on delivering results today while also courageously evolving Hershey to set us up for sustainable growth. To our partners and customers, thank you for your insights, creativity and shared focus on innovation.

To our consumers, thank you for allowing us to delight you and create more moments of goodness, however big or small. And finally, thank you to our investors and analysts. You've been alongside us for all of it and your engagement and focus on our business and the industry has undoubtedly pushed us to become an even stronger company, one that is well positioned for the future and one that I am honored to hand over to Kirk. Steve, Anoori and I are now available to take your questions.