For two years, the conventional wisdom has been that GLP-1 medications were going to gut CPG. Smaller appetites, fewer impulse buys, less candy at the checkout. Hershey's Q1 2026 earnings call on Thursday delivered a different — and weirder — message. The category that's getting hurt is the one analysts thought would benefit (smaller-portion candy). The category that's surging is the one nobody had on their bingo card: mints and gum.

CEO Kirk Tanner, on his second earnings call since taking over from Michele Buck, told analysts that "we've also seen strong demand for gum and mints, as the category benefits from functional snacking tailwinds, including GLP-1 adoption." He singled out Ice Breakers — Hershey's third-largest confection brand — for an 8%+ jump in retail sales during the quarter.

The reason, as CBS News and CNBC both spelled out on Thursday: GLP-1 users complain about bad breath. Slower digestion plus appetite suppression equals what the medical literature politely calls "halitosis associated with semaglutide therapy" — and what TikTok now calls "Ozempic breath." Roughly one in eight U.S. adults has tried a GLP-1 drug, and that number has only climbed since the FDA expanded compounding restrictions last quarter. That's a lot of mints.

Hershey's Q1, briefly

Headline numbers came in ahead of the Street. Revenue rose 10.6% to roughly $3.1 billion, and adjusted EPS topped Bloomberg consensus, helped by price hikes the company pushed through to offset still-elevated cocoa costs. Hershey raised its full-year outlook, and the stock — which has been a punching bag on cocoa anxiety and GLP-1 fears — rallied through Friday's session.

Endcap covered the cocoa-and-tariff angle earlier this week. Tanner's GLP-1 commentary is a separate story, and a more interesting one for the broader CPG complex.

The new "functional snacking" playbook

What Tanner is doing is reframing — taking a drug-induced consumer behavior and translating it into a category positioning. "Functional snacking" lets Hershey put its mint, gum, and protein-adjacent products under a single growth narrative the Street can underwrite. Zero Hedge and BeautyMatter-adjacent trade press both flagged the framing.

It also gives Hershey cover. The same CEO who is admitting GLP-1s are pressuring core chocolate volumes can simultaneously argue the same drugs are creating an offsetting tailwind elsewhere in his portfolio. Investors get a story that nets out to "we figured out how to grow into the GLP-1 era." The reality on the ground is more uneven, but the narrative is doing real work.

What it means for retailers

For grocery and c-store buyers, three things matter:

The front-end mint and gum set has been losing real estate to phone-charging cables, energy shots, and CBD gummies for the better part of a decade. Hershey just gave merchandisers permission to fight back. Expect Mondelez (Trident, Stride) and Mars-Wrigley (Orbit, Extra) to pile into the same talking point on their next calls. Snack-stock investors are already pricing the rotation.

The GLP-1 patient cohort is a defined-buyer segment with a predictable basket. Pharmacies and grocers with prescription data (Walgreens, CVS, Kroger, Albertsons) can target functional-snacking promotions to households actively filling weight-loss prescriptions. Whether they will — given the regulatory minefield around using prescription data for cross-merchandising — is a different question.

And the broader CPG-vs-GLP-1 narrative just got more complicated. The simple thesis that weight-loss drugs are an unmitigated negative for snacking is dead. The new thesis is that GLP-1s are reshaping baskets in granular ways — appetite-suppressing categories down, oral-care and palate-management categories up. Expect every CPG CEO on the next earnings cycle to hunt for their version of the Ice Breakers story.

The asterisk

Hershey doesn't actually break out GLP-1 attribution from secular mint growth, post-pandemic gum-chewing recovery, or Ice Breakers' specific marketing push (the brand has been investing in flavor extensions). Tanner's claim is a confident reading of internal data, not a peer-reviewed study. Some of that 8% comp lift is GLP-1; some is execution; some is the ongoing reset of the gum category off its 2020 lows.

Still: when the largest confection company in North America puts GLP-1 mint demand into the prepared remarks of an earnings call, and the stock rallies on it, the category has a new tailwind to plan around. Mintel, NielsenIQ, and Circana will tell us in six months how much of it sticks. For now, Hershey just turned a side effect into a strategy.