Conagra Brands is bringing its $3.3 billion snacks portfolio to the National Confectioners Association's 2026 Sweets & Snacks Expo, running May 19–21 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Chicago-based food company is spotlighting meat snacks, seeds, and sweet-and-salty offerings from a lineup it describes as home to several industry-leading brands.
For restaurant and hospitality operators, the Expo floor is more than a candy show—it's an early read on snack formats that increasingly migrate from retail shelves into grab-and-go cases, hotel minibars, bar snack programs, and limited-service menus. Conagra's portfolio breadth, spanning savory protein snacks to indulgent confections, reflects the blurring of snack dayparts that operators across segments are navigating right now.
Meat snacks remain a high-margin, high-velocity segment for convenience-oriented foodservice channels, and Conagra's emphasis on that category signals continued investment in formats that travel well and require no preparation—a practical fit for hotels, stadiums, and fast-casual operators building out packaged snack revenue streams. Sweet-and-salty hybrid products, meanwhile, continue to outperform single-note snack categories as consumer palates push toward more complex flavor experiences.
The Sweets & Snacks Expo is widely considered the premier annual gathering for confectionery and snack industry professionals. This year's Las Vegas edition gives buyers, distributors, and foodservice procurement teams a consolidated look at what the country's largest branded snack suppliers are prioritizing heading into the back half of 2026. Conagra's presence—backed by a portfolio of that scale—makes it one of the more closely watched exhibitors on the floor.
Operators tracking emerging snack and beverage industry analysis trends will find the Expo's exhibitor mix a useful barometer for what's likely to land in distributor catalogs and on menus by Q4. For broader context on how packaged food innovation is reshaping restaurant snack and appetizer programs, the categories Conagra is leaning into—protein-forward, portable, flavor-layered—align closely with what purchasing managers are already fielding from their guests. Food & Beverage Magazine has also been tracking Conagra's portfolio moves as the company sharpens its snacking focus.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
