Good morning. I'm Leah Jordan, the packaged food and food retail analyst at Goldman. 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. having us. Hershey really needs little introduction, 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 Dot's Pretzels. I think before we get into our chat, I'll turn it over to Steve for some quick comments. Thank you. Great to be here. Appreciate the interest in the stock. This is a unique time in history. You know, we're coming off two 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. As we look to this business, you know, we're coming off a period of price-driven top-line growth, but know that the best healthy business is gonna have a mix of volume and price going forward. 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. We're excited to get to tell that story today. Oh, thank you, Steve. Yeah. Great to have you all. Maybe just to start us off, you know, following up to those comments. You know, Hershey has had, you know, a number of headwinds across the industry over the last few years, but the company seems to be emerging even stronger now. You've laid out long-term plans recently at your Investor Day, and you have elevated growth expectations through 2027, a return to algo beyond that. Maybe just at a high level, you can just talk about the key drivers underlying your confidence in that longer-term outlook at this point. Sure. I'll start with what you said, Leah. You know, we are stronger coming out than we were going in. You know, we had always a commitment to driving a disciplined P&L and discipline growth strategy. The pressure from commodities in the last two years made that even sharper. 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 gonna drive growth long term. As part of this recovery, we have invested in our brands in a more significant way. We've invested in areas like R&D to make us more long-term competitive on innovation. We've invested in our retail sales team, and in particular, the technology that'll allow them to be even more efficient than they are so far. We'll have the opportunity to invest in innovation. 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. You know, I'd say our head's not in the sand. You know, we see the macros that you all see. You know, we see GLP-1s, we see SNAP. I'm sure we'll talk about those. More recently, we see the pressure from fuel prices. Even with all of those and the state they're in, you know, we have confidence in the outlook because we are deep into each of those areas, and they're performing inside the expectations that we set when we established our plan for this year and for 2027. It's very helpful. I think we're gonna jump right into. Yeah Of those things that you said we would. The macro backdrop remains dynamic. Maybe just you could talk about your recent consumption trends you're seeing. You know, how resilient has demand been against those macro pressures, and especially things like changing, terms for SNAP as well as even GLP-1s? Sure. I'll 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. You know, we are always affected by seasonal timing. We have sometimes shipments move from one quarter to another to respond to the seasons. When you look at the year-over-year lapse, 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 to the balance of Q2 as you start to see the data gets a lot cleaner. We don't have that seasonal noise and some of the other shipment noise. As that signal gets clearer, you'll get to see some of these things play out in real time. From a SNAP and GLP-1 standpoint, you know, 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 wanna be, you know, as much as we can be, experts in our categories on those two 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. That is just one part of the data that we're 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've got those consumer pressures embedded inside our outlook. Obviously, there's sort of a defensive piece of, hey, this is happening, how are we gonna react? 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 products in the confection space, and ours in particular, that they can purchase. In the case of GLP-1s, you know, you heard Kirk talk about helping with breath and refreshment or protein to make sure that we've got products that are gonna be able to participate in the need for protein. 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. Again, as we sit here today, everything is fitting inside the impact that we expected. That's great to hear, I know we'll all be happy to get past the seasonality. see the normalized trends. You have a strong seasonal business. That's right. That's always gonna come. Maybe kind of broadening off of that topic, I mean, you know, demand overall pretty healthy, but you've taken significant inflation-based pricing over the last year or so. You know, what are you seeing in terms of elasticity on the back of that? You know, how do you think about sustainability of that pricing action if we should see, you know, more macro pressure on the consumer? What other levers do you still have beyond pricing as well? Sure. Our retail sales team is in stores, multiple stores every single week. We as the leadership team have a meeting every week where we review what they're seeing on shelf, you know, what's happening or not happening on price, innovation, velocities, et cetera. 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 expectation. You know, 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. 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, you know, 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 two years, which is largely price driven, top line growth is not the sustainable model. You know, we want a more balanced price and volume component. That's part of our algorithm. 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. 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. You know, maybe you could talk about what's impacting recent market share trends. You know, highlight where you've been winning, how do you expect market share to evolve as we move through the year? Mm-hmm. Dave, I'm gonna give you a chance to take that one. Yeah, sure. You know, 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 temp poles and the merchandising. We feel good about what's coming and us, you know, 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 gonna happen in 2027. We have that as 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, which just happened in spring at 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 gonna invest unwisely to try to compete with, 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 someplace else to compensate. You know, that doesn't fit the way we manage the P&L. We wanna drive good ROIs, smart investment. We'll have some premiumization strategies coming later this year, next year that will get at that component in a bigger way, but, Dave did a great job summarizing. No, that's great. That's a well-balanced approach. I know you play in many categories. Kind of going back to that discussion around innovation, 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. Maybe provide more color. You know, it sounded like premiumization, but maybe of the plans or what you're willing to share today, you know, what can we look forward to as we look ahead? Yeah. I'll maybe touch on the tentpole piece, and then, Anoori, you can talk a little bit about the innovation that's coming. Both exciting. Tentpole is kind of a opportunity that was always there that we probably didn't take as good of advantage of as we could have. You know, we're great in seasons. That's part of the reason the retail sales team is so impactful, is they can help retailers merchandise effectively seasons. The notion is, hey, how do we take that strength and leverage it in these shoulders in between seasons? 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 brands. That's really some of the opportunity in the tentpoles. Tentpoles will be different every year. You know, 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. Every year has some unique events that we'll be able to tap into. It's really to say, "Hey, let's bring all the strength we have of seasons to bear on these, shoulder seasons and create more goodness in between the big events." The sales team's energized by this. I think we're energized because it's gonna give us more, you know, 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 a strength. Innovation is really important. We've got some good things coming that we can share for this year, including Q2 and beyond, and a teaser probably for next year. Yes. Right now we have our spring items out. We've got the Reese's Marshmallow, the Reese's Peanut Butter and Jelly. We've got new flavors across our sweets portfolio on Jolly Rancher that are all hitting the markets or will be in the market over the next with merchandising vehicles over the next couple months. 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's Creme Filled Bar that will be coming out in time for back to school season. As we look ahead, you know, we're re- 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 2027 that will be more incremental, a bit more disruptive across some of those growth spaces that we laid out at Investor Day. Great. I know a lot we'll still be asking on into the fall as we get closer to 27, it sounds like. It sounds like you're going to be pushing the envelope, I guess, in innovation, you know, in the back half and into next year. We've talked about premiumization, making balanced, you know, or ROI, you know, decisions. 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 know, you continue to do really well in legacy brands, right? Hershey, Reese's still growing double digits even after all of these years, but there's a lot of opportunity in other categories. Just how meaningful could the expansion into premium ultimately be in this? 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. Despite all of these expansion opportunities and exciting, you know, the core is the most important. As we talked about at the investor conference, we still have opportunities for distribution on the core, that is a big focus. You know, we want our top 70 SKUs everywhere. As you saw, we still have opportunities for more distribution points for that. That is job 1. That is actually the funding source for some of the investments. We wanna make sure that we execute that well. We look at where the consumer is going, and we talked about premium and premiumization. You know, we don't have permission to play in all parts of premium. Premium's a big space. You know, we're not in the ultra premium. That's probably not where we, our brands have permission to play. 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. 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. You know, we've got One in the portfolio. We've got Fulfil in the portfolio. This is a place also, again, it partly in light of the macros, where these brands can get a more focused attention than what we have had in the past. We believe that we're gonna 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. You know, we've made great progress with Jolly Ranchers. We have more room to grow there. That segment of the category price softened a little bit, but our opportunity to grow in that space and grow the category in that space is still strong. You know, I, you know, me 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, you know, we laid out the 40% ambition, so we're gonna 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 gonna depend on where the consumer is. You'll see a big step forward in 2027 in all the places that Steve talked about. Okay, great. No, yeah, that, again, still a lot to look forward to and still doing a lot of strength in the core. Firing on all cylinders there. You kinda teed me up the next part. You know, we've 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? How much more opportunity do you see to expand distribution for the brands that you have today or just in growth going forward? Yeah, we love this portfolio, you know, great foresight by the team at the time that got us in with SkinnyPop, and then I think some great additions, organic expansion, great additions to the portfolio. 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. We like to talk about Pirate's Booty at the investor conference. You know, it's small in the grand scheme of things, but that brand probably hasn't been refreshed in my time with Hershey. In a way, shame on us. It's a great product. It resonates in kids snacking where we have permission to play. Even the smallest part has opportunities to grow. We're in the middle of integrating LesserEvil, and that's going great, right on plan. We'll have opportunities to scale that up, 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. As I look across all parts of the salty portfolio, 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. In fact, as we think about expansion to that portfolio, we will always be looking for something that's unique and differentiated and sustainably differentiated from others. It gives us this place, as Kirk would say, to be the insurgent brand inside this space, unlike where we are with confection. In addition to the top line opportunity in that business, we have margin opportunity as well. You know, 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. Now with our new ONE Hershey operating model, that will drive additional opportunities for margin enhancement on the salty businesses. We have more integrated customer conversations, more integrated activations in store. More scaled resources across the two businesses. Yeah, very enthusiastic about the salty business. Great. You're gaining share, you're doing very well. We have heard, you know, competitors adjust their pricing. Maybe just any quick comments around the competitive environment today in that category? I would say for us, stable. You know, 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 spaces. We have a differentiated different role than some of those do. 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 wanna 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. I think we have to get to cocoa. Yeah. We all think that that topic is put to bed. My favorite. You know, 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, you know, an opportunity for a margin recovery. Although we have seen it tick up a little bit here more recently. 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? Also longer term, how are you thinking about just mitigation strategies over time, be it hedging, be it sourcing or anything there? Sure. On the current market, you know, we still meet every other week, with our cocoa team out of Geneva and talk, what's happening on the fundamentals. You know, one of the things I think we talked about before, we have more visibility into fundamentals, whether it's, you know, pollination trends, weather trends, you know, fertilizer use, pod counts than we ever had before. You know, I guess the good to come out of the high cocoa price. Our fundamental belief is we still are in a supply excess standpoint on the physical side of cocoa right now, and in a demand, you know, still a reduced demand environment. On the fundamentals alone, we would say, you know, there's probably still opportunity for cocoa to come down from where it is, certainly where it is, let's say, in the last couple of days. That said, it's also wrapped up in a financial market, and the financial market implications are less easy to call, and that's partly 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 gonna look like." To your point, our supply chain is much more diversified than it was maybe 10 years ago, even five years ago. We're much less reliant on one particular region for our cocoa. What the hedging program allows us to do is diversify also the financial implications. The fundamentals of the policy haven't really changed the last couple of years. You know, 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. You know, the ability to buy direct sourced cocoa, which we did a few times over the last few years. Our risk management philosophy hasn't fundamentally changed. 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. Anything, Dave, you'd add to that? Yeah, I'd say we have visibility, good visibility in 2026 and into 2027 as well, which gives us, you know, sort of confidence in the plans that we have. Obviously, you know, there's more hedging to go do, but we have time. To do that. Oh, that's great to hear. Okay. I think kind of building on that discussion, I think when you lay out your plans for 2027 and into 2026, we're in this path of a margin recovery, and you have the visibility on the cocoa side, one of your biggest inputs there. As the broader discussion, and I know this comes up a lot with investors, I mean, as you look longer term, how do you think about your ability to get back to kind of your high water mark of growth margins in that mid-40s range? I mean, as you think about potential shifts, should salty grow at a faster rate or anything around there? Sure long-term path. I mean, our aspiration is still to restore our margins back into that domain. You know, I don't wanna say we're gonna hit the high water mark, 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. Having said that, we also wanna make sure that we're driving dollars. You know, one of the things we're doing by driving volume growth is bringing in new consumers and bringing more dollars in as well. That'll be the toggle as we look forward. We wanna get our margins back to the range they were in before, but we also wanna 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 two years. You know, we are leaner in the back office than we were before. We've got common data platform. We've got, you know, 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. 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. These will be the good problems that I think we're gonna have for the next two years. Yes. Yeah, much better than watching every pod count. That's right. Of cocoa. Okay. I think, you know, as we kind of pull together pieces of the chat, right? There's, there's momentum across your portfolio, there's visibility on cocoa, you're managing and executing better than you have. As you look at your outlook for 2026, maybe just what are the biggest risks you're watching, you know? If things come in better than you expect, how do you think about those trade-offs today versus reinvestment or just kind of flow through at this point? Yeah. I, you know, the things that we are gonna watch the most is our execution. You know, the plan for this year is pretty loaded, you know, with the tent poles and the seasons. We wanna 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'll be something we have our eye on. I think we'll have good visibility into that because of the pods and their engagement in what's happening at the consumer level. But our job is to really make sure we execute and then also lay, you know, lay the foundations and the rest of the building structure underneath the 2027 plans. I think if we do over-deliver 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 2027. I would say that our plan as we sit here today, we've got a pretty good 2027 plan. Like, we've got a pretty sufficient level of investment. So the default isn't gonna be to just sort of save it for next year. I think we're gonna allow some of that to flow through this year as well, assuming we have that upside. Hope that answers. That's very helpful. Yeah, no. Always, like every company, right, we've got to always watch the macro. That's right. Things are always shifting, but that's very helpful color. Maybe, you know, next we could just talk about capital allocation. It does seem momentum is at your back. You've got a solid balance sheet. You continue to improve the business. Maybe how are you prioritizing today? How does that change? Any other broader comments around M&A and how that fits with as you think about the portfolio evolution. Sure. Dave, you wanna talk capital allocation? Yeah. our capital allocation strategy is always been the same. And we, you know, 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. With that, we've taken our dividend back up into the range of where we, you know, 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. You know, leverage is in a good spot, et cetera. 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, you know, giving back to shareholders. We've got a bit of activity we've already done around replenishment this year, and, you know, we're thinking about that as well as we think about the remainder of the year. Yeah. 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. Our M&A team is great at connecting at businesses large to small. Some of the small ones we can make early investments to, you know, see how it plays out, and we wanna be in every dialogue. That hasn't changed. What I always say, the caveat is we are picky. You know, we want things that are gonna drive shareholder value. We want things that are gonna 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. With that said, we're always looking, but we're also gonna be very finicky about what fits this portfolio. No, I think that makes sense. I think I have time for one more, and this is one I was hoping we would get to. You know, productivity has been a big focus for Hershey. I know, Steve, you talked about it a long time. You drove 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. Maybe can you just tell us what's changing about how you operate today? Why are you making this change now? Maybe any early learnings. I know it's very early, but as you've implemented it. Sure. There were two key enablers to being able to do this. One is the IT system that I mentioned before. You know, getting all the business on one common platform. Before that, you know, it would've been hard to integrate data and integrate decisions. The second was frankly the scale of salty business. You know, 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 two boxes ticked, One Hershey started to become a reality. I'll say this was driven as much by customers as it was by us. You know, prior to this, we would go to customers and have three different dialogues. We'd talk about functional snacking, we'd come back and talk about salty, and then we'd come back and talk about confection. Customers were saying, "Hey, you know, can we do this more efficiently?" 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. We can leverage the different parts of the portfolio with each other. You know, the example we've talked about is Fourth of July, you know, big salty snacks time. We've got, you know, a seat at 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. 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 tent poles. We'll see it again with the seasons. 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. Salty, you know, they never, they were never neglected, but they have access to a bigger portfolio of capabilities probably than they had before. 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 B 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, we do eat more. I love it. on a hot summer day. With the Hershey's chocolate. Hey, try the caramel in there. It's very good. Yes, lots of options. I think we'll leave it there. Thank you all very much. Very good. Thank you. Very curious. Appreciate it.