Kraft Heinz offered a closer look at its $700 million investment plan Thursday at the company’s annual investor day in New York.
The global food and beverage giant said in August that it was putting $100 million more toward its $600 million investment plan announced in February.
Kraft Heinz executives said the company is spending $325 million on marketing, $250 million on pricing, $75 million for commercial talent across sales, marketing and R&D, and $50 million on product and packaging improvements.
The investment comes after two consecutive years of declining sales at Kraft Heinz, as price increases failed to offset weakening demand. Net sales fell 3% in 2024 and another 3.5% in 2025, reaching $24.9 billion.
Righting the ship at Kraft Heinz
CEO Steve Cahillane said 2026 is a reinvestment year with a focus on recovering lost market share.
“We right-sized our marketing, invested in our products and innovation pipeline and hired talent to bolster our commercial teams, and we are seeing results,” Cahillane said at the investor event. “Our market share losses have narrowed, and our volume trends have improved.”
The business reset transitions into a momentum year in the second half of 2027, while 2028 and 2029 will accelerate and sustain growth, according to Nico Amaya, executive vice president, North America Region.
With the new model in place that focuses on “win big” brands like Kraft, Heinz and Philadelphia, the company is positioned to recapture market share, Amaya explained.
“Win big will lead the acceleration, powered by step-changing innovation, and the rest of the portfolio keeps improving on the fundamentals,” Amaya said. “We started with a foundation few companies have. You’ve seen the plan to turn it into growth, and the evidence that is working. We’re not where we want to be yet – 2027 is the year the momentum starts becoming visible, and we’ll show you the progress quarter by quarter.”
The Heinz brand alone is an over $5 billion brand, according to Kraft Heinz Chief Growth Officer Diana Frost.
“Brands that stop being invested in stop being relevant, and for too long, that’s what happened here at Kraft Heinz, but we changed that with over $700 million of incremental investment this year,” according to Cahillane.
Focus on big brands
Frost said that Heinz experienced stalled growth because the company stopped investing in the brand along with other top-performing portfolios.
Heinz is one of three billion-dollar-brands – along with Kraft and Philadelphia – the company is focusing on for growth.
A decade of underinvestment hurt the company with consumers and resulted in a decline in distribution with retailers, according to Cahillane.
“What we need to do is build, earn and deliver value from these remarkable assets,” he said, explaining that companies like Kraft Heinz that leverage their scale as a competitive advantage will win consumers.
The effort to win back customers will take time, Cahillane said.
“We’re making progress, and we remain constructively dissatisfied, but we have to be realistic about the pace. Retailers reset their shelves only a couple of times a year, and as I mentioned earlier, change takes time to show up in the numbers,” he said.
Emerging markets strategy
Kraft Heinz is also counting on its emerging markets business to help return the company to growth.
Cahillane called emerging market growth “one of the most underappreciated parts of our story,” noting that Heinz has a 96% worldwide brand awareness among consumers.
These international emerging markets bring expanding middle-income consumers with rising disposable incomes that create a $49 billion total addressable market for taste-elevation products, he explained.
“The runway is significant, and we are uniquely positioned to capture it,” he said.
