🍿 Hershey’s is popping off

Instead of scouring travel sites for the best hotel deals, what if you just switched houses for a few days?

That’s the idea behind Kindred, a members-only home-swapping platform co-founded by Justine Palefsky and Tasneem Amina in 2021.

It’s currently available in North America with 2k+ homes in 50+ cities, but just raised $15m to expand, per TechCrunch.

How it works

Members — who may be homeowners or renters — are both hosts and guests in a “give and get” model. For every night they host, they earn a night in another member’s home.

They just pay a service fee (up to $30/night) and a cleaning fee per stay, saving potentially hundreds in hotel costs; frequent users can pay a $600 annual fee for unlimited stays and no service fees.

In addition to vetting members, Kindred adds a lot of personal touches, including complimentary hosting kits, professional photography, and cleaning.

It’s not a brand new model

HomeExchange, which charges a $175 annual fee, has been around since the ‘90s and boasts a massive network of 450k+ homes worldwide.

Others have a niche.

• Thirdhome is for luxury stays; it claims the average home value is $2.4m.
• TrustedHousesitters matches animal lovers who care for each other’s pets in exchange for a free stay.

They all differ greatly from Airbnb and Vrbo because those really aren’t home-sharing platforms — they’re for making money, which could be why they’re now saturated with property management companies.

Fun fact: One Kindred member once composed a song using sounds of the house — cupboard doors, microwave buttons — for their host. It’s called “Chilling on Goss Lake.”

We’re gonna go ahead and take a wild guess that salt is not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “The Hershey Company.”

And yet, the brand sprinkled more than a little into its latest annual report, with the word “salty” appearing 51 times compared to chocolate’s 52.

All these mentions, in reference to Hershey’s Salty Snacks segment, underline how seriously the company is taking its stated vision of being “a leading snacking powerhouse” and growing its share of the $36B market.

Salting away cash

Its Confectionery segment — including top-selling Reese’s — is still the company’s bread and (peanut) butter, but Hershey’s snacks division Salty Snacks now represents a $1B+ business line of its own.

The division — which includes treats like Pirate’s Booty and SkinnyPop — accounts for ~10% of the company’s sales, up from 5.4% in 2020. Leadership is hoping to take it to ~20% this decade, per Food Dive.

Much of this growth has come through snackquisitons — first of Amplify, SkinnyPop’s parent company, for $1.6B back in 2017, and second, of Dot’s Pretzels, for $1.2B in 2021.

These investments appear to be twisting into big profits, with Hershey stock up 13%+ in the past year, compared to the S&P 500’s -6%.

What’s next?

SkinnyPop has been a standout for Hershey — now nearing $550m in annual sales, up from $200m pre-acquisition.

To support this growth, earlier this week Hershey addressed the ever-relatable struggle of not having one’s own popcorn manufacturing facilities… by purchasing two of them.