For Hershey, the countdown to the holidays starts more than a year in advance.
The Reese’s maker estimates that its seasonal operation for holidays, including Christmas and Easter, generates roughly a third of its North American confectionery sales, which totaled $9.1 billion last year. To prepare, Hershey has to ensure it’s ready well ahead of time — next year’s Halloween, for example, is largely already planned out.
The holidays give the snacking giant an opportunity to boost sales, heighten consumer awareness and maintain its competitive edge through the launch of new flavors, shapes, packaging and marketing promotions.
This year alone, the Pennsylvania company debuted vampire-shaped Kit Kat Counts for Halloween and most recently launched Snickerdoodle Hershey’s Kisses and Kit Kats coated in peppermint-flavored creme with crunchy red candy pieces for the Christmas season. Last week, it brought its 35-year-old “Holiday Bells” Kisses commercial to life as part of an interactive experience tied to the Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Food Dive sat down with Tiffany Menyhart, Hershey’s chief customer officer, to talk about the importance of the holidays for the company’s business and how it views the future of seasonal snacking.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
FOOD DIVE: This time of the year is a busy one for Hershey. Tell us more about the importance of holidays for your company.
Tiffany Menyhart: Certainly, seasons are a huge part of our business. They’re very important to us, both from our candy, mint and gum business, but also our growing salty snacks business.
We’ve always been a seasonal leader at Hershey. We’re also a trusted advisor to a lot of our retail partners in planning their entire holiday season. So whether that’s your traditional seasons like Valentine’s and Easter and Halloween, which are a large part of our business. We want to make sure that as we look for our existing brands and our core brands, along with innovation, that we’re continuing to be part of those moments that matter during those special occasions for our consumers.
The Halloween season we just finished, and we’re already starting to [prepare] for next year. So if you think about that, we’ve taken lessons learned from 2025 and already built that into some very strong plans for ‘26. …We’d say overall, our core brands and our new product innovation that we launched in 2025 performed very well.
You’ll see in 2026 we’ll have even more interaction across our sweets portfolio. We’re very excited about that. We’re also working to enhance what we call our visual identity system. That’s really how the products show up, both on websites as well as in the store. So if you think about a very large assorted bag of candy, making sure that the consumer knows what they’re purchasing in that bag, and the piece count.
Optional Caption
Courtesy of Hershey
Can you provide more details on Hershey’s strategy when it comes to planning for a holiday?
The seasons are such a long lead time, not just for Hershey, but for our retail partners. To give you some examples, a lot of retailers closed the Halloween season. We help to advise them on what worked and what didn’t work across the entire category for that particular season.
Where we really look to optimize is around the insights and consumer behavior and consumer patterns … that’s really where we see digital activation, ensuring we have the key price points, ensuring our promotional strategy is up to par for our consumer. Certainly, we have a plan going into the sale, the selling part, but a lot of that is predetermined, and then we’re able to again take the learnings we have when we start a particular season and roll that into our sales cycle for the next year.
Using Halloween as an example, how much of the 2026 season is already planned out?
It would be the majority, probably 80% to 90% is thought out. It’s because the retailers go right into selling the next season. So we have to be ready for our retail partners. We have to have those insights. And I’ll give an example. We spend a lot of time thinking about new flavors and what will delight our consumers and really be additive to those moments if they’re already reaching for a Hershey Kiss at the holidays, what’s the new flavor profile that they would want.
All of that is backed up by consumer testing that occurs way before the selling of that season starts. So we’re going to talk about some new, exciting flavors for the holiday that are in the market right now. All of that consumer testing would have been done well in advance of selling the holiday season for 2025.
How have you seen holiday snacks and candy evolve?
We absolutely see a lot of treats at home. It’s about 32% or 33% of the usage occasions are what we call snacking at home or candy dish. Hershey plays huge in that space, right? The top two holiday brands in the season are Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s, that’s huge for us.
We also see a lot more in terms of gifting and treating. Gifting owns a 33% share of seasonal sales, and has posted a 7% compound annual growth rate during the last three years. Our data suggests that gifting candy (primarily chocolate) is sitting at about 42-44% incidence rate among those who celebrate the holidays and purchased candy in the last two years (2023-2024), up from 39-40% in 2019-2020.
If you think about gifting stocking stuffers, all of our candy canes filled with either Kisses or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with Minis, all of that has definitely been on the rise. … It’s really important that Hershey continues to look at what the consumer needs are within the season, and then adapt the portfolio to meet those consumer needs.
How are you ensuring that seasonal innovation doesn’t cannibalize sales of your existing offerings?
Hershey Kisses have always been a very popular brand item during the season. And they’re used a lot in baking as well. Baking is something we see really pop in the holiday time frame versus some of the other seasons. So, yes, we have Hershey Kisses that are traditional Hershey Kisses that you buy on the shelf every day. But we also then look at new flavors of Kisses, new foils of Kisses. One of our new flavors is the Snickerdoodle Kiss. It’s in a special foil wrap. It’s a different color than our others, but it also scored exceptionally high in terms of consumer appeal.
When we put it in front of consumers, we saw that 66% of consumers said that it would be additive. They would buy it incrementally, in addition to the other Kisses that they buy during the season. If you walk into some retailers today, or you go on to some of our retailer sites, you will see that certainly, we’re co-merchandising a traditional Hershey Kiss, which, again, is iconic and used in baking during the holidays. And then we’re also bringing in our new flavor profiles such as snickerdoodle or sugar cookie, which we also launched last holiday.
What else is Hershey doing to help it stand out during the holidays beyond innovation?
We have a very skilled and robust merchandising team that’s out at retail every day, setting up those displays that are eye-catching and ensuring that the Hershey brands and the Hershey products get out in front of our consumers. Hershey also has been part of the Christmas spirit now and the holiday spirit for over 35 years with our “Holiday Bells” commercial with the Kisses. But this year, we’re actually partnering with NBC Universal with the Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting Ceremony and bringing [the holiday Kisses] to life. That creates a different value in a different moment. And it does differentiate.
