Is The J.M. Smucker Company Woke?

Company Overview

The J.M. Smucker Company (NYSE: SJM) began in 1897 when Jerome Monroe Smucker started pressing apple butter in Orrville, Ohio. It is still headquartered there, and a Smucker still runs it — Mark Smucker, a fifth-generation family member, serves as Chair, President and CEO. That continuity is the company's entire brand identity: the checkered lid, the cursive script, the "with a name like Smucker's, it has to be good" jingle that has been running since the Johnson administration.

The portfolio is far bigger than jam. Smucker owns Folgers and Cafe Bustelo in coffee, Jif in peanut butter, Uncrustables in frozen sandwiches, Milk-Bone in pet treats, and — since the 2023 acquisition — Hostess, which brings Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Donettes under the same roof. If you have a pantry, you almost certainly have Smucker products in it.

That is exactly why the 70/100 score matters. This is not a coastal apparel brand courting a demographic. It is a heritage Ohio food company whose folksy marketing and corporate policy record have quietly drifted apart.

ESG & Sustainability

Smucker publishes an annual Corporate Impact Report — the most recent is the 2025 edition — organized under a "Thriving Together" agenda with five stated priorities: Ending Food Insecurity, Building Strong Communities, Ensuring an Ethical and Responsible Supply Chain, Cultivating a Thriving Planet, and Nurturing Happy Pets. The company also voluntarily publishes its EEO-1 workforce demographic filing, most recently for 2024.

We will give credit where it is earned. The food insecurity work is real charity with real recipients, and a company that makes peanut butter and jelly donating peanut butter and jelly to food banks is about as coherent as corporate giving gets. The sustainability targets are unremarkable in either direction. If Smucker's ESG program were the whole story, this would be a 20-point company, not a 70-point one.

DEI Programs

The DEI apparatus is where Smucker separates itself from the pack. The company runs a formal Inclusion, Diversity & Equity (ID&E) function, and it has pushed that function past headquarters and into the plants through a dedicated Operations Steering Committee. It also introduced "Leading Inclusively," described by the company as a required multi-day training program for people managers.

Required is the word doing the work there. Most corporate DEI programming is opt-in — a lunch panel, a self-paced module nobody finishes. A mandatory multi-day curriculum for everyone who supervises anyone is a materially different commitment, and it means a plant supervisor in Ohio who took the job to run a production line sits through it whether the content matches their convictions or not.

The conservative corporate watchdog 1792 Exchange rates Smucker "High Risk," and its stated reasons include mandated trainings on gender identity and racial ideology and an absence of viewpoint protections for employees — meaning the company's nondiscrimination policy covers many categories but not political or religious belief. Those are 1792's characterizations of the programs, not the company's, and readers should weigh them as advocacy findings rather than neutral audit results.

One correction to our own prior scoring note: an earlier version of this profile stated that FY2025 executive incentive awards were tied to qualitative ID&E objectives. We could not re-verify that claim against a dated primary source in this review, and we are withdrawing it rather than repeating it. If it is accurate, it belongs here; we are not going to assert it until we can point at the proxy statement.

LGBTQ+ Advocacy

Smucker operates a PRIDE Alliance employee resource group, and CEO Mark Smucker has publicly credited that group with shaping the company's benefits, policies and practices for LGBTQ+ employees — an unusually direct statement that an ERG drives policy rather than merely providing community.

The company announced a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign's 2023-2024 Corporate Equality Index, earning HRC's Equality 100 Award. 1792 Exchange records a 100 on the 2025 index as well. We could not confirm whether Smucker participated in the 2026 CEI — and that ambiguity cuts both ways. HRC reported that Fortune 500 submissions to the 2026 index fell roughly 65 percent, so a company's absence from the current list may reflect the broader corporate retreat from public DEI disclosure rather than any change in internal policy. We are not going to score a company as having reformed because it stopped filling out a survey.

Smucker also signed HRC's Business Coalition for the Equality Act, the corporate lobbying bloc backing federal legislation that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act. This drew direct shareholder pushback: in 2022, Inspire Investing ran an engagement campaign arguing the company had departed from its heritage of family values and warning that the Equality Act threatened religious liberty. By Inspire's own account, Smucker heard them out and did not change course.

1792 Exchange further states that Smucker's health plan covers transgender-related medical costs including surgeries and puberty blockers, and that its philanthropic screening runs through the Benevity platform, which it says vets recipients against the Southern Poverty Law Center's designations and excludes some religious organizations. Again — that is 1792's finding, attributed as such.

Political Activity

Smucker does operate a corporate PAC. THE J.M. SMUCKER COMPANY PAC (FEC ID C00669655) registered in February 2018 and remains active, raising roughly $66,000 in the 2023-2024 cycle. Organization-wide contributions in the 2024 cycle totaled about $281,000, the bulk of which is individual employee giving rather than PAC money. We were not able to verify the partisan split of those contributions, and we are not going to guess at it. Corporate food-industry PACs frequently give to both parties along committee lines rather than ideological ones.

1792 Exchange alleges Smucker donated to Equality PAC — the LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus-aligned committee — and engaged in ideological lobbying. We did not independently confirm that contribution in FEC records during this review, so treat it as an unverified allegation from an advocacy source.

A second correction: our prior scoring note claimed there was no verified pattern of left-leaning political giving and no confirmed CEO Action signature. Both statements now look wrong. 1792 Exchange documents that Smucker's CEO signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge (an initiative SHRM took over in October 2024), and raises the Equality PAC giving above. We would rather correct our own record than defend a stale score.

Consumer Impact

At 70/100, Smucker is the most committed company in this batch, and the gap between its marketing and its policy file is the honest reason to care. Nobody buys Folgers expecting a position on federal civil rights legislation.

Practically, this is a hard company to avoid entirely — Folgers, Jif, Uncrustables and Milk-Bone are category leaders, and store brands or smaller regional roasters and nut butters are the realistic substitutes. Uncrustables in particular has no close equivalent, which is worth knowing before you promise yourself a clean break.

One caveat we will state plainly: this score rewards disclosure. A company that quietly kept every one of these programs but stopped publishing its impact report and stopped submitting to the CEI would score lower without changing a thing about how it operates. Read the number as a measure of documented commitment, not of hidden virtue elsewhere.