Hershey: Advancing Living Wage Across Its Direct Workforce

31 August 2026

Living Wage as a human rights issue

At Hershey, Living Wage and Income are embedded within a broader human rights framework. They are treated as one of three central pillars of the company's human rights agenda, and as an important enabler to address underlying issues. The premise is that if people within Hershey’s value chain earn enough to meet their basic needs, the conditions that enable exploitation and abuse are less likely to take hold.

This approach shapes how the work is organized internally. Living Wage, which focuses on Hershey’s direct full-time employees, is managed by the company’s Compensation and Sustainability teams and assessed through an annual wage analysis. Living Income, which centers on strengthening financial resilience within supply chains, is led by Hershey’s cocoa sustainability, procurement, and broader sustainability teams. While closely connected, the two initiatives require different data sources, stakeholder relationships, and remediation strategies. Maintaining distinct ownership enables Hershey to tailor its approach while advancing a shared goal of improving economic well-being across its workforce and supply chain.

Closing the wage gap

Hershey is committed to ensuring that all full-time employees earn a Living Wage. For a company with more than 19,000 employees across U.S. and global operations, maintaining a Living Wage commitment requires reliable, consistent data. Each year, Hershey conducts a comprehensive wage analysis that compares employee pay to widely recognized Living Wage benchmarks. For U.S. employees, Hershey uses the Living Wage For US benchmarks, and for international employees, it relies on WageIndicator. These benchmarks support alignment with credible, transparent standards that reflect the cost of living across different regions.

Hershey reports continued progress, with nearly all full-time employees in the U.S. meeting Living Wage benchmarks and its full-time international workforce meeting WageIndicator benchmarks. Any identified gaps are reviewed for remediation action.

Benchmarking wages across a global workforce

In 2024, Hershey started working with WageIndicator’s databases as a Living Wage benchmark for all their international employees. Hershey also uses the free data available on WageIndicator's public website as part of its supply chain risk assessments, comparing living wage figures against national minimum wages to identify where gaps are largest and where risks to workers are most acute.

Identifying risk in agricultural supply chains

Each year, Hershey conducts a material risk assessment of its supply chain, prioritising countries based on spend, sourcing volumes and human rights risk. Cocoa, palm oil and sugar consistently sit at the top of that assessment. The process involves layering human rights risk data on top of commercial exposure to determine where the company's leverage and responsibility are greatest.

The gap between Minimum Wages and Living Wages in many of the sourcing regions for these commodities is a key signal. Where that gap is wide, and where sourcing volumes are significant, those become priority areas for deeper engagement.

The Income Accelerator Program with suppliers

Turning attention from employees to farmers requires a different approach entirely. Fundamental to the living income programming in the cocoa supply chain are investments focused on increasing assets and resilience, concepts Hershey believes are directly connected to increasing farmer income and reducing poverty.

To further their work on farmer income, Hershey launched their Income Accelerator in Côte d’Ivoire in 2022. The Income Accelerator is a five-year program that is being implemented in partnership with Rainforest Alliance and CARE.

Cash transfers (CTs) are a proven poverty reduction strategy that provides cocoa households with an additional source of income. As part of the Income Accelerator, Hershey in partnership with the Rainforest Alliance will distribute mobile cash transfers of up to $600 per household per year to approximately 5,000 cocoa farming households within its supply chain. These CTs, which offer an additional source of income for households, promote practices that increase farm profitability and resiliency to unexpected environmental circumstances.

VSLAs are community-based groups that help individuals — especially women — and communities learn about saving, borrowing and investing responsibly. Hershey is strengthening existing Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in its supply chain and establishing new ones.

Hershey is also working with the Committee on Sustainability Assessments (COSA) to develop a framework that can travel across different commodities and geographies, while still accounting for the specific conditions of each context.

The role of industry collaboration

The Hershey team emphasises that implementing Living Wage and Living Income at scale is a pre-competitive issue. Progress depends on shared standards, quality data and collective movement across industry. In practice, this means openly sharing methodologies and learning from peers, collaboration that ultimately benefits everyone in the system.