Meet the 2024 Category Captain for Packaged Snacks: Hostess Brands

In 2023, the Hostess team continued to build collaborative retail partnerships while investing in new solutions aimed at driving packaged sweet snacks category growth. 

Hostess once again put thought leadership at the forefront, unveiling the "Heart of Snacking Growth" in February 2023, a category strategy aimed at unlocking growth through three fundamental pillars: growing snacking occasions, the importance of impulse and the upside in omnichannel. Throughout the year, Hostess introduced, socialized and implemented custom insight-driven strategies with its retail partners that focused on the five growing snacking occasions: morning sweet start, lunchbox, afternoon reward, immediate consumption and evening reward.

During the year, as consumers began purchasing fewer units per trip to offset the cost of rising prices, Hostess invested in Eversight, a price and promotional tool enabling revenue optimization through basket-driving initiatives. Leveraging Eversight, Hostess conducted custom tests with c-store retailers and supplied key learnings to optimize price and promotion strategies.

In pursuit of unlocking impulse opportunities in c-stores, the Hostess Consumer Insights Team also conducted a qualitative research study in 2023 titled "Illuminating the Convenience Store Channel." The team fielded in-depth, multicity and multibanner consumer exploratory shopalongs with core c-store shoppers. The study provided learnings on key impulse triggers, top trip missions, attitudes and behaviors among c-store shoppers.

All information contained in this profile was supplied by the company.