Is Hormel Foods Woke?

Company Overview

Hormel Foods is the Austin, Minnesota packaged-foods giant behind Spam, Skippy peanut butter, Planters nuts, Applegate naturals, Herdez, Justin's, and a sprawling refrigerated and grocery portfolio sold through mainstream retail and foodservice channels. Founded in 1891, it remains one of the most recognized names in the American pantry, with a workforce of roughly 20,000 and a culture rooted in its small-town Minnesota founding. Jeff Ettinger-era diversification pushed the company decisively toward healthier and ethnic-food brands, and today it operates under an enterprise framework rebranded as

Good Feeds Us All

— a Planet-and-Society sustainability architecture that, notably, kept its diversity apparatus fully intact through the 2024-2026 corporate DEI retreat that reshaped many of its grocery-aisle peers.

ESG & Sustainability

Hormel publishes an annual Global Impact Report under the Good Feeds Us All framework, with Planet-pillar commitments covering greenhouse gas reduction, water stewardship, packaging, and regenerative agriculture ambitions across its supply chain, and Society-pillar commitments covering team member programs, community hunger relief, and supplier practices. The 2024 Global Impact Report, released in 2025, reaffirmed all of these commitments with no announced retreat from any prior environmental or social target. The company has invested heavily in animal-care auditing, antibiotic stewardship, and vendor codes; its Applegate and Justin's brands carry their own natural-and-organic positioning. None of this is unusual for a large food company in 2026 — but none of it was walked back either, which by the standards of the past two years is itself a data point. A November 2025 restructuring eliminated roughly 250 corporate positions, but the company framed it purely as efficiency-driven, with no references to program changes.

DEI Programs

Hormel's diversity and inclusion operation is active, named, and public. The company maintains nine volunteer-led employee resource groups spanning Black, Asian American, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, women, veterans, disabilities, and young-professional communities, all promoted on its live careers site with dedicated pages. Its Inclusion in Action pages describe belonging and engagement-survey commitments, scholarship programs, and supplier-diversity engagement. Hormel's code of conduct and careers materials continue to use explicit diversity-and-inclusion language throughout 2025 and 2026 — no rebranding to belonging or opportunity, no sunsetting of ERGs, no quiet deletion of webpages. The USA Today roundup of companies that rolled back DEI after 2024 does not include Hormel. For a Midwestern meatpacker-turned-food-conglomerate, Hormel has held its inclusion infrastructure with more fidelity than a long list of supposedly progressive consumer brands.

LGBTQ+ Advocacy

Hormel's flagship LGBTQ+ commitment is HProud & Allies — Hormel Professionals Representing Out and United Individuals & Allies — an employee resource group the company publicly spotlights each Pride Month with employee-story features on its own newsroom. The deeper institutional tie is the Human Rights Campaign scorecard: Hormel Foods Corp. earned a perfect 100 and the Equality 100 Award on the 2025 Corporate Equality Index, verified in HRC's official appendix and celebrated in trade press, on top of a prior 2023-24 perfect score.

Where the record stands in 2026

Hormel is not on the 1792 Exchange's July 2026 compilation of verified CEI 100 companies — its verified perfect score is the 2025 cycle, and the 2026 survey cycle saw participation collapse across the board. The company has not announced any exit from HRC participation, so the honest read is that Hormel was a verified Equality 100 employer in 2025 whose 2026 status is simply not yet confirmed on the public lists.

Political Activity

Hormel's political spending is small and strikingly balanced. OpenSecrets records just $7,279 in total 2024-cycle federal contributions from the organization — roughly 53% to Democrats and 47% to Republicans, mostly small-dollar individual donations rather than PAC firepower. There is no evidence of a muscular partisan operation. The historical footnote that binds Hormel to politics is the founding family itself: Jay C. Hormel's grandson is the late Ambassador James Hormel, a Clinton-era Democratic donor and the first openly gay U.S. ambassador, whose activism put the family name at odds with some of its heirs' public commitments — but that is family history, not current corporate behavior. CEO Jeffrey Ettinger retired in 2016 and his successor Jim Snee retired in turn in 2025, triggering a carefully staged transition: former chief executive Jeffrey Ettinger returned as interim CEO for a fifteen-month bridge effective July 14, 2025, with president John Ghingo — a Mondelez and Applegate veteran promoted as the company's eleventh president — slated to take the top job, and the leadership has kept the company's public voice focused on food and community rather than electoral politics.

Consumer Impact

Hormel scores 70 on the Buy Woke Free index — high enough to notice, lower than the tech and finance giants that dominate the top of the scale. The receipts: nine identity-based ERGs, a named LGBTQ+ employee group spotlighted every June, and a verified 2025 CEI 100 from the Human Rights Campaign with no announced retreat. The offsetting facts: political spending that is negligible and evenly split, no consumer-facing Pride merchandising stunts, and a business squarely focused on feeding people. For values-based shoppers, Hormel lands in the awkward middle — if a verified HRC perfect score and formal DEI bureaucracy are disqualifying, Spam, Skippy, and Planters all carry that baggage, and alternatives range from store brands to smaller regional producers; if you weight actual consumer-facing behavior and political spending more than internal HR programs, Hormel is far less aggressive than its score suggests. Either way, know what you are buying: a 135-year-old Minnesota food company that quietly kept every diversity commitment intact through the years when most of its peers dismantled theirs.