Sweets & Snacks 2026: Brands Are Ready to Invest. Can Teams Keep Up?

The 2026 Sweets & Snacks Expo moved to Las Vegas for the first time, pulling in more than 16,000 professionals. Dustin Cherry and Rachel Doueck walked the floor for ForceBrands. We don’t cover this category as industry analysts. We watch it for one thing: what the trends mean for the teams behind these brands, and the leaders they’ll need to find and keep to capitalize on them. Here’s what they took away.

Dustin, you came back saying brands felt healthy. What does that mean for the people running them?

Dustin: Healthy means they’re in a position to invest, and they know where to put their money. Most of the brands I talked to are ready to spend on moving product, on the shelf and online. The category backs that up. Confectionery hit a record $55 billion last year, though the honest read is that inflation drove most of that dollar growth while unit and volume sales struggled. It doesn’t mean growth is easy. And the first place that spend gets tested is the team. A brand investing in growth is betting the people it has can turn that capital into results. That’s the conversation we end up in: whether the team can deliver on the investment.

Rachel, you saw co-packers turning into brands and a wall of better-for-you bars. What does that shift ask of a client’s team?

Rachel: Two things. First, the co-packers. Many manufacturers that built on private label and co-packing are now launching their own branded products. Picture a company that sells chips to ten packaged chip brands, and now is putting its own bag next to theirs. Overnight, it’s a different company. Co-packing is an operations game. Running your own brand means brand marketing, retail sales, the whole front end. The team that got them to this point isn’t the team that wins the next chapter, and most haven’t staffed for it yet.

Second, the bars. I had close to fifty in my bag by the end of day one. The U.S. protein bar category is in the billions and still growing, according to industry estimates, and every one of those brands is chasing the same buyer. When the product development stories all sound alike, you don’t win on formulation. You win on marketing. And that comes down to whether you’ve got a proven team that can build the brand.

Dustin, did the rest of the floor lean healthy too?

Dustin: No, and that’s the part worth noticing. There was a clean split. One side was purely indulgent. Lots of sour, lots of fun, no health story at all. A few brands were pushing less sugar, But honestly, this wasn’t a show built on health claims. That split is a people decision waiting to happen. An indulgent brand wins on branding, impulse, and shelf presence. A better-for-you brand wins on a credible claim and a different consumer. Those are two different growth stories, and they often require two different commercial teams. The mistake I see is brands choosing one lane on the shelf and hiring as if they’re competing in the other.

Dustin, everyone wants growth marketing right now. Why is that the opportunity and the risk at once?

Dustin: I spent time with a growth-stage investor on the floor, and we kept circling one question: the growth is there, so how do you go after it thoughtfully, without wasting money? The catch is that top talent who do it well are hard to find. Our soon-to-be-released 2026 State of the Industry research backs that up. When consumer brand CEOs name the functions hardest to hire, performance and growth marketing comes in second, behind only revenue and sales leadership. So the thing everyone wants to invest in is the function they are having trouble filling. If this is going to be critical to your growth, start the search before you’re desperate, because everyone else is about to be looking for the same person.

Labor and import costs came up a lot. Why call those a hiring problem and not just a margin one?

Dustin: Take the China piece. A lot of confection comes straight from China, and the 2025 tariffs pushed up the landed cost across the board, with China-origin candy carrying extra duties on top. Brands are rethinking sourcing in real time. The reason it’s a hiring problem is the function that solves it, supply chain and demand planning, is the third hardest to hire according to CEOs in our data. You can’t reroute a supply chain with the team you used to run it. Brands that stay ahead of supply chain challenges put experienced operations leaders on the problem early, not after a quarter of blown margins.

Rachel, what’s your take? Brands are ready to spend, so why do you keep landing on whether their teams are ready?

Rachel: Because that’s the whole game. In our latest research, six in ten consumer brand CEOs say they’re scaling, and most read their teams as ready. But a third of their own C-suite doesn’t agree. That gap is exactly where momentum stalls. And waiting is expensive here. Brands participating in our research report that most senior searches take ninety days or more. As Dustin said, if you wait until the seat is urgent, you’ve already lost the quarter. Brands that move early get to choose from the strongest pool of experience. Rather than react, they thoughtfully design the role, assess the team honestly, and land the right person. The ones that wait manage the fallout instead.

What about brands that might not have headcount or budget for traditional hiring right now? What does moving early look like for them?

Rachel: Adding expertise to the team doesn’t always mean a full-time search. More than half of the CEOs we surveyed brought in fractional or interim leaders in the past eighteen months. If you want to push growth marketing before the model’s fully proven, that’s often a smart first approach. Put an experienced operator in the seat, prove the play, then decide what permanent looks like. Move with intention.

Dustin: Same on the cost side. Get an experienced ops leader on sourcing before it turns into a crisis. Most teams see the pressure coming. Far fewer act on it in time. The brands that win the next year won’t be the ones with the best products at this show. They’ll be the ones who anticipated the team needs and built them before they needed to.

If you’re sizing up what the next stage of growth will ask of your team, we’re ready to help you align your people strategy with your ambition.