I don’t usually talk about company earnings here. If you want play-by-play on margins and guidance, there are plenty of people who do that better than I ever will. Also, IMHO most earnings reports fall into one of two categories: “we made bucketloads of money, we’re brilliant” or “we didn’t make money, it’s not our fault”.

But Hershey’s latest results made me pause for a bit, mainly because I got sidetracked wondering what the company’s pronouns might be (we tackle the important questions here at Market Shake)… But also because, while these results fall in the latter category of earnings report, it actually points to something useful about where indulgence is heading. 

Hershey raised prices 10% across its North American confectionery portfolio in Q4 2025. High input costs, tariffs, geopolitical issues, yada yada yada. Sales went up 7%. Net income fell 59.9% for the quarter, 60.3% for the full year, and volume dipped by 5 points.

So, revenue held up while profit slid and people bought less. This pattern is becoming pretty standard right now: everyone still wants a treat, but the average consumer isn't feeling economically romantic enough to indulge as often as they used to. Meanwhile cocoa and other inputs are doing their best to give finance teams a heart attack.

But the more interesting number was in Hershey’s salty snacks segment, which now includes 4 brands: SkinnyPop popcorn, Pirate Brands, Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels, and most recently LesserEvil, an organic snacks brand acquired in November 2025. That segment posted 28% sales growth in Q4, with volume up 14 points. Even stripping out LesserEvil, the company’s salty snack retail growth was 15.6% for the quarter.

Hershey bought its first salty snacks brand in 2017. That segment now accounts for about 10% of annual revenue, and the company has been explicit that it wants to push that to 20%. This isn’t a “more chips” strategy. In fact, Hershey has mostly stayed away from the most crowded conventional salty categories and built something premium and cautiously better-for-you instead.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to talk about.

Sweet indulgence is getting squeezed from two directions at once.

First, sugar. According to Innova, when consumers were asked which ingredients they are most conscious of limiting, they sugar ranks #1, ahead of fat, ahead of sodium. And a lot of consumers aren’t interested in clever swap solutions here. The same data suggests many would rather simply cut back than switch to sugar alternatives. That’s not really a health trend. It’s a permission problem: the sweetness-as-reward story is getting harder to justify often.

Second, chocolate brands are dealing with a core input that’s behaving like a meme stock. Cocoa prices hit record highs in 2024 (the International Cocoa Organization flagged the April peak) and they’ve swung sharply in both directions since. If your job is to sell “affordable joy”, it’s a bit awkward when your main ingredient refuses to act normal.

So brands have two problems at once: consumers saying they want sweet indulgence less (permission), and the cost of delivering it going haywire (profitability). The indulgence impulse doesn't disappear when this happens. It just needs to find a new location.

And this is why Hershey’s salty snacks investment looks more and more like a really smart hedge. Let’s be clear: salty snacks aren’t an easy category by any measure - they have their own drama going on. But they don’t depend on sugar and chocolate being cooperative at the same time. 

The default image of indulgence is still chocolate, cake, something glossy and drippy, possibly with a molten center. Sweets tend to live in the “reward” part of the brain. They’re the emotional pick-me-up, the stress snack, the “I deserve this” moment, because they’ve historically been marketed and ritualized that way. They’re the treat you’re allowed to enjoy with fewer questions attached.

Savory has historically had a different job description: filling the gap between meals, or the “sensible” option when you want something without the full commitment.  An article in Nation’s Restaurant News used a useful phrase for this mindset: “mitigated indulgence”, a happy medium between treating yourself and not overdoing it. 

That’s the gap that's closing. Savory indulgence isn’t just “salty snacks, but premium”. It’s when a savory product delivers dessert-level payoff without leaning on sugar as the main reward mechanism. It starts acting like a treat.

This doesn’t have to be a sweet-versus-salty cage match. Sweet and salty already coexist in most people’s snack lives. The question is whether savory can stop being the ‘sensible indulgence’ and start behaving like the thing you crave.

And crucially, this doesn’t have to be a health story at all, and that gives savory a clear opening by being more rewarding than responsible. 

A great example of this savory indulgence comes from German company Bakerman, which makes savory “pizza” donuts, including versions stuffed with cheese. It’s such a simple move, but it works: the donut shape already signals “treat” and the stuffed center is pure reward. It’s got the dessert logic of “I regret nothing,” just with a savory payload. No significant sugar required to get there.

Stéphane says many of these textures come naturally from bakery formats. Laminated doughs, filled pastries, or structured breads generate complexity through fat distribution, fermentation, and dough structure. From a manufacturing perspective, these formats also scale very well. Once the base is standardized, brands can introduce new flavors through fillings, toppings, or seasonings without changing the core production process. This makes bakery-based formats particularly effective as innovation platforms, combining strong sensory appeal with efficient large-scale production. And Stéphane’s own work developing bakery products highlights this!

These bakery formats above are doing something interesting. They’ve been built to absorb variation without changing their core: new filling, new topping, new seasoning, but same base and same production process. That's the underlying logic of what's becoming one of the more interesting concepts in savory innovation right now: the platform snack. A base designed not to be the whole experience, but to create the conditions for one.

Simple Mills is a useful case. The brand makes crackers, cookies, snack bars, and baking mixes, all built on nutrient-dense nut, seed, and vegetable flours. In 2024, it generated US$240 million in net sales, representing a 14% year-on-year growth, more than doubling from US$105 million in 2020. In January 2025, Flowers Foods (the Wonder Bread company) paid US$795 million to acquire it. That's a lot of dough for a lot of dough by a bread giant for essentially a cracker brand.

I jest, but what Simple Mills’ core cracker actually is, is a platform: a premium, clean base designed to be built on. The indulgence doesn’t live in the product itself, but rather in what you do with it, like add cheese, dips, spreads, honey, hot sauce, etc.. The cracker creates the conditions for the treat instead of trying to be the whole treat. And the same brand logic spans its sweet and savory lines without the products competing with each other, which is not an accident.

This is why the cracker and crispbread category has been getting more interesting. The category now has some serious craft cues and ingredient flexes: sourdough signals, fermentation language, seeds and nuts, interesting grains, deeper toasting, better textures. And maybe they’re not that great as a snack on their own (you may want an accompanying beverage strategy). But they’re a base worth building on.

One reason platform snacks have so much range is that they don’t have to stay purely savory. The same base can swing sweet-leaning (breakfast, coffee pairing) or savory-leaning (aperitif, snack board) without needing two completely different products.

This is where “swavory” comes in, though it’s a bit more specific than sweet + savory mashups. It’s not an equal sweet-savory mashup, but where sweetness is used like seasoning: a small amount of something sweet that makes the savory more intense and more rewarding. Think of it as the inverse of sea salt on caramel. Instead of salt flakes landing on a sweet base, you get caramel notes landing on a salty one.

We’ve already watched “swicy” grow from a cute portmanteau into a full-blown flavor lane, and swavory is just the next logical step. Even IFT’s 2026 flavor outlook points to swicy mashups and savory-sweet pairings as ongoing drivers of innovation. For platform snacks specifically, this contrast is where a lot of the indulgence lives, and it’s one of the few flavor moves that expands occasions without requiring a reformulation.

The practical upside of a platform snack isn't just taste range. It solves a problem the industry has been trying to crack for years: personalization.

Every year, we hear that personalization is going to go mainstream. The problem is you can't mass-produce something “personal” without draining it of meaning. You end up with a shelf of variants that mostly exist to confuse the buyer. 

A platform flips the model. Instead of personalizing the product, you give consumers a base they remix themselves. Personalization happens at the point of eating, not at the point of manufacturing. And that's actually how people eat – they assemble and graze, dialing intensity up or down based on mood.

There’s something else in this that's easy to miss: control. 

A platform snack lets someone decide how indulgent that moment is going to be: how sweet, how salty, how “worth it”. The consumer gets to build the version that fits their mood (and their rules) that day. Giving consumers a base that helps them dial indulgence up or down is a powerful offer. It lets them turn a snack into their snack.

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