On September 3, Campbell’s Company (NASDAQ:CPB) held its fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 earnings call and delivered a message investors don’t hear from a century-old food company every day: the dividend is getting cut by more than a third. Quarterly sales fell, profit fell harder, and management is now asking shareholders to trust a multiyear rebuild plan while snacks keep sliding and inflation keeps climbing. It’s a lot to absorb in one call, and the numbers behind it explain why.
Betting On Soup And A Cleaner Cost Base
Campbell’s is leaning hardest on what already works. CEO Mick Beekhuizen pointed to the cooking side of the soup business, where retail sales tied to cooking have grown at a 5% compound annual rate over the past four years and now make up more than half of Meals & Beverages retail sales. The company is chasing what it calls “semi-scratch” cooking, meals that take under 30 minutes and five ingredients or less, a bet that stretched grocery budgets push people toward doctoring a base rather than starting from raw ingredients. Meals & Beverages organic sales rose 3% in the quarter, helped along by Rao’s.
On the cost side, Campbell’s launched a new $500 million savings target through fiscal 2030, layering $350 million of fresh cuts to procurement, supply chain, and headcount on top of $150 million carried over from an older program. Pricing is also shifting: about 60% of the portfolio is getting price increases of roughly 4% to 5%, which management expects to turn from a Q1 drag into a real tailwind by the second quarter. Goldfish is showing “encouraging trends,” per Beekhuizen, with a gluten-free version launching in the first half of fiscal 2027, and Fresh Bakery improved sequentially in the fourth quarter.
Snacks Are Dragging The Whole Story Down
The quarter itself was rough. Net sales fell 8% to $2.137 billion, adjusted EBIT dropped 25% to $242 million, and adjusted EPS fell to $0.39 from $0.62 a year earlier. Full-year sales dropped 5% to $9.744 billion, and operating cash flow slipped to $1.039 billion from $1.131 billion. Campbell’s also took a $117 million impairment charge on its Kettle Brand and Cape Cod trademarks, a direct admission that the salty snacks business is worth less than it once thought.
That business is the real problem. Snacks organic sales fell 6% in the quarter, and segment operating earnings dropped 34%. CFO Todd Cunfer didn’t soften it, warning that “Q1 for Snacks is going to be very, very challenging,” with high single-digit declines and fixed-cost deleverage weighing on results before any recovery shows up. For fiscal 2027, Campbell’s is guiding to organic sales down 4% to 2% and gross margin down 50 to 100 basis points, with inflation running 5% to 6%, fully 80% hedged in the first half but only half covered in the back half. Interest expense is also set to climb roughly $25 million on debt tied to the La Regina acquisition and an anticipated bond refinancing.
