Kristen Riggs

President of Salty Snacks, Hershey Company (The)

Search every verified Kristen Riggs interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Kristen Riggs, president of Salty Snacks at Hershey, has discussed the company's approach to category growth and consumer behavior in recent appearances. In a 2021 interview, she spoke about how consumers maintained emotional connections to seasonal celebrations during the pandemic, noting that people found new ways to celebrate holidays and that candy played a central or mood-setting role in those occasions. She also addressed the confectionery category's relatively low share of better-for-you products compared to other snack categories, stating that accelerating growth in that area was important for Hershey. In earlier appearances, Riggs described Hershey's retail strategy for Halloween, emphasizing the importance of organized merchandising and in-store displays to help consumers find candy solutions, and noted that candy in the basket increased overall basket size. She also discussed her background in engineering, saying that problem-solving skills from science and math have been valuable across her career in manufacturing and marketing, and she expressed interest in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence.