2026 Capital Spending Outlook: Tightening the Belt

Now, underspending their budgets has become typical for these companies – but not by the amount they trimmed last year. For context, in 2023 this group (which included 32 companies at that time) spent only about a billion dollars less than they had forecast for the year, and in 2024, actual spending lagged forecasts by “only” around $300 million.

Of the 25 food and beverage processors featured this year, 16 spent less in fiscal 2025 than they had budgeted. Four of those companies cut their 2025 capex outlays by more than 20%; 13 trimmed at least 10%.

And although the group expects to spend more in 2026, the individual hits to capex keep coming. More than half the companies (14) in the report plan to spend less in 2026 than they did in 2025 — with 10 of them trimming more than 10% from their capex budgets. Billy Roberts, senior analyst-food & beverage for CoBank, sees food & beverage companies deploying capital in other areas outside of traditional capex.

“The story has been more about almost retrenching in their space and fending off competition from private label and other brands to re-establish their market share,” he says, citing Kraft Heinz’s plan to invest about $600 million across product, packaging and price to drive volume growth, rather than focused on capex projects. “That seems to be the prevailing sentiment for a host of companies in the CPG food & beverage space.”

Hershey Co. is one of the few that didn’t show a precipitous drop in its 2025 capital expenditures ($455 million) versus its budget (in a range between $425 million and $450 million), but the company had already tightened its belt from 2024 when actual spending was $606 million. For 2026, expect a continuation of 2025’s numbers, the company has said.

“You see capex kind of normalizing again back into the space where it should be,” Steve Voskuil, senior vice president and chief financial officer, said during Hershey’s fourth quarter 2025 earnings Q&A session.

                   Top Capital Spending Projects in 2026

Snack processor Utz Brands expects to get back to a reduced level of capex as well, at least according to comments from company CFO BK Kelley during the company’s presentation at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York event in mid-February.

“Our capex spending is now normalizing after the significant step-up over the past two years, when our investments in capacity, automation and modernization reached 7% of net sales,” Kelley told the audience. “With this transformation largely complete, we expect our capex to step down to approximately 4% of net sales in 2026, and … further to approximately 3% of net sales in 2027 and longer term.”

Utz’s published capex forecast for 2026 is roughly $60-65 million, down from $99 million and $103 million in actual spending the past two years.

Beer maker Anheuser-Busch appeared frequently in the news throughout the past year and a half for frequent investment in its U.S. breweries, headlined by its “Brewing Futures” initiative. That program, announced in May 2025, promised a $300 million expansion of its investments into its U.S. manufacturing facilities.

Despite that, Anheuser-Busch did underspend its 2025 budget by about $200 million globally — but it did bump up its 2026 capex outlook to the same target as 2025 (in the $3.8 billion range). This approach fits with what Ken Fleming of OY6 Capital has seen in the marketplace.

“Capex appetites in 2026 are real but cautious,” he says. “F&B companies want to invest — and many need to — but overarching economic and consumer pressures continue to create friction, slowing down the flow of major capital projects."

Is AI stealing some funding?

Roberts believes a new investment target could alter capital spending fortunes, at least based on recent comments and moves by some of the publicly traded CPG companies.

“Agentic AI is clearly an area where companies are devoting considerable investment,” he says. “PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Unilever — even non-food CPG companies the likes of Clorox, Reckitt Benckiser and P&G — indicated agentic AI is an area where they are investing either to support their supply chain or more consumer-focused ambitions.”

Agentic AI is a rapidly emerging category of artificial intelligence that can act autonomously, set or pursue goals, plan, reason and take actions with minimal human supervision. It goes beyond traditional or generative AI by not just responding to prompts, but by completing tasks end‑to‑end, often across multiple steps and often without human interaction.

Roberts adds that these companies have yet to share deep details of their ambitions, but agentic AI is top of mind for them; and implementing it will require further investment on the hardware and software sides.

Lash of Morningstar says companies are taking an approach aimed more toward realization of the benefits of prior years’ investments in technology, ERP systems and the like. However, “not everyone falls into this camp,” she adds, as Mondelēz International and McCormick & Co., for instance, are still going through the implementation process.

To be clear, brick-and-mortar expansion or renovation has not been abandoned for 2026 and beyond, and all one needs to do is watch the recent newswires to discover some major capital projects. Chobani, Smithfield Foods and a group led by Red Bull announced three separate, billion-dollar-plus plans to build new facilities this past year.

Chobani announced in May 2025 that it will spend $1.2 billion to build a processing facility in Rome, N.Y. (which is in addition to a $500 million expansion of its Twin Falls, Idaho, plant). Smithfield Foods in February committed $1.3 billion to build a new pork processing complex in Sioux Falls, S.D., to replace its legacy facility in the downtown area. And Red Bull teamed up with Ball Corp. and Rauch Fruchtsäfte to revive and break ground on a new energy drinks plant in Concord, N.C., that will cost the group $1.5 billion. That project was originally announced in 2021 and was delayed four years.

These new projects, along with numerous others, are good news for growth, as the top project on last year’s list (ranked by investment cost) is ramping up to full capacity. American Foods Group’s $800 million, 800,000-sq.-ft., America’s Heartland Packing beef processing plant in Wright City, Mo., opened partially last June and is expected to be fully operational (handling 2,400 head of cattle per day) sometime this year.