Hershey unified confection and salty under ONE model; salty sales up 23%

What was changed

Writing in Fortune a year into his tenure, Hershey President and CEO Kirk Tanner describes the structural change behind his first-year numbers: until about a year earlier, Hershey sold confection and salty snacks 'largely as separate businesses talking to the same retailers.' The company replaced that with the ONE Hershey model — bringing confection, salty and functional snacking to market with one voice, one investment strategy, and a 1,200-person sales force covering more than 75,000 stores, pitched to retailers around occasions and snacking needs rather than categories.

He attributes the early results to that model: North America salty snacks sales grew 23% this year, nearly four times faster than the company overall. The innovation system changed alongside — more R&D investment, expanded technical capability, faster insight-to-shelf, and a pipeline he says is more than 50% larger. Its proof point is Reese's Oreo, built from the observed consumer behavior of dipping an Oreo in peanut butter: over $188 million in retail sales in twelve months, which he calls one of the most successful candy innovations of the last decade.

Tanner frames it as brand-relevance discipline rather than a reorg: 'presence is not the same as preference.' The year's marketing — Hershey's biggest brand campaign in eight years debuting at the Winter Olympics, a S'mores nostalgia push, Christian Pulisic's World Cup run, and a planned HERSHEY Movie telling founder Milton Hershey's story — is presented as the demand side of the same integration.

Why it worked

Separate confection and salty sales teams were walking into the same retailers with competing pitches.

Retailers organize around occasions and needs, so a single sales voice with one investment strategy captures more of the shelf.

A faster insight-to-commercialization pipeline converts observed behavior — like Oreo-in-peanut-butter — into products at scale.

What can be applied

Retailers buy occasions, not your org chart; merging categories into one sales voice concentrates shelf power — and the fastest-growing piece of the portfolio proves the point within a year.

Aftermath

The company says the model continues through year-end with the Olympic campaign and the HERSHEY Movie, its founder's story on the big screen for the first time. All growth figures are the CEO's own account in the essay; the salty-snacks growth rate is presented as four times the company overall.