The Hershey Company has deployed a new proprietary AI tool developed in-house that uses computer vision and augmented reality to identify optimal placement for s'mores displays and measure their performance based on consumer data (Modern Retail). The platform has been deployed across several thousand stores and allows sales teams to photograph displays in-store, which the AI tool then analyzes alongside point-of-sale data to determine where displays perform best (Modern Retail). Hershey also implemented an AI marketing-mix model that pulls data from social, search, and streaming platforms to enable real-time advertising decisions, reducing what once took five months of manual work to an overnight process (Modern Retail).
For commerce practitioners, Hershey's approach illustrates how AI-driven merchandising and real-time consumer data can drive measurable business outcomes. The company achieved a roughly 20% year-over-year increase in retail media return on ad spend for s'mores during the season (Modern Retail). Notably, pallet train displays outperformed end caps by 101%, and the company found that displays placed near complementary categories like camping products generated high consumer interaction (Modern Retail). The s'mores category itself generates $200 million to $250 million in overall sales during peak season, roughly from Easter through Labor Day (Modern Retail).