The chocolate giant behind your Reese’s fix is going green — and this time it’s not just the wrapper.
The Hershey Company has unveiled a new enterprise sustainability strategy called Source, Make, Delight, putting supply chain resilience and environmental accountability at the centre of how it does business.
What’s in the box:
- Hershey is targeting a 50% reduction in absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030, alongside sourcing 100% of electricity from renewable or zero-emissions sources by the same deadline.
- A US$40m initiative in Côte d’Ivoire — the Hershey Income Accelerator Program (HIAP) — will support 20,000 cocoa farming households with training, financial incentives, and productivity tools.
- The company has pledged to cover one million hectares with regenerative, restorative, or protective farming practices by 2035.
- On the logistics side, Hershey is cutting 25 million pounds of packaging and optimising its network to reduce fuel use and miles travelled.
- Water recycling investments and waste reduction across global manufacturing facilities round out the operational ambitions.
The strategy addresses a core tension: cocoa, Hershey’s most critical ingredient, is grown in West African regions increasingly hammered by climate variability, deforestation, and water stress. If the farms fail, the chocolate does too.
Whitney Mayer, Head of Global Sustainability at Hershey, framed the stakes plainly — supply chain resilience starts at the farm level and runs all the way to the shelf.
Looking ahead… With consumers increasingly scrutinising the full lifecycle of what they eat, Hershey is betting that building sustainability into product development — not just operations — is the path to staying relevant over the next decade. Whether it can hit those 2030 targets while maintaining margins will be the real test.