The Hershey Company (NYSE:HSY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Steve Voskuil : Yeah, we haven’t built it already. I mean, there will probably be some build, not that material. I mean there’s a limit to how much salty inventory we can build. But as we said, when we get to the fourth quarter, we expect a pretty significant depletion. And that’s really just to allow the cutover between systems. And so on a net-net basis that will look like a negative for the year for that business. We would expect to see that come back next year, probably with a strong start to the year.

Chris Growe: Okay. Thanks so much for your time.

Steve Voskuil : Sure.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from line of Nick Modi with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Nick Modi: Yeah, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Hi, Michele, hi, I was hoping you could just comment on fill rates, kind of where you guys are now versus kind of where you’d like to be. And I know things are below where they have been historically. Just curious, is that just a function of capacity? There’s also a labor component to that. And then I had a bigger picture question.

Michele Buck : Yeah, so I would say our fill rates are much better than where they were. There’s been some significant improvement versus last year, as we’ve been able to invest in capital and get additional capacity on the ground. So and really, there’s minimal impact from labor. It was really, largely very much tied to capacity. Now we did step up in labor to enable us to be able to obviously execute against the capacity, and the incremental lines. But we’re seeing less network disruption than we’ve seen in the past, not all the way back to the perfect situation it was before the pandemic, but it certainly improved.

Nick Modi: Right, thanks for that color. And then just the bigger picture question is, look these categories, especially on the chocolate and confectionery side, I think, clearly, we can see a renaissance. And maybe we can attribute some of that to COVID. But I’m just curious like, what does your research, internal research say about what’s actually going on with the consumer and these categories? Because I think we can all agree the underlying trend rate has been much better than I think anyone would have expected a couple of years ago.

Michele Buck : Well, certainly we know that snacking has been on the rise, has continued to be on the rise as a consumer behavior, pre-pandemic, and also post-pandemic. We know that there still is a bit more at home behavior versus folks cutting back on going to restaurants. And certainly that’s a benefit across packaged goods snacking. We also know based on our insight that consumers are interested in snacking and particularly in confection and chocolate on two diametrically kind of opposed parts of their emotional state. One is when they are incredibly happy and it’s a treat time, and they want to treat themselves and the other is when there are downtimes, and they want a bright spot. But they do view these categories and especially chocolate as a part of kind of emotional wellness, what it does and how it makes them feel.

And then of course I think that the more that we interact with consumers and this really hasn’t changed over time, consumers have emotional connectivity to our brands. Our brands are more about the products — more than just about the products. They are about the moments of connection. Many of them are used in special times. And we get letters all the time with people talking about the special role that some products played in their life. They remember when they were with a friend, experiencing it or with their kids at a season. And I think that continues to be timeless, and perhaps has even dialed up a bit since the pandemic.

Nick Modi: Great. Thanks for that caller.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason English with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

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