Hormel’s 60-Year Dividend Streak Masks a Troubling Reality: Raises Are Shrinking
Hormel (HRL) confirmed 60 consecutive years of dividend increases, but its latest raise was just 1%, a figure that barely keeps pace with inflation while shares have lost 41% over five years.
McCormick (MKC) follows the same slow-raise playbook, while Kraft Heinz (KHC) took the opposite path and rebased its payout rather than growing it steadily.
Hormel's dividend is well-covered, with adjusted EPS guidance of between $1.45 and $1.51 comfortably exceeding the $1.17 annualized payout and $827 million in cash on hand.
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An income streak this long earns automatic respect. Hormel Foods ( NYSE:HRL ) confirmed with its fiscal 2025 fourth quarter release that it has now delivered 60 consecutive years of uninterrupted dividend increases, cementing its place among the market's Dividend Kings. The headline is impressive. What sits under it is more nuanced: the most recent raise was a 1% bump that lifted the annualized rate to $1.17 per share, and the payout is barely keeping pace with a broad inflation backdrop that pushed the CPI to 334.980 in August 2026 from 323.976 a year earlier.
The verified dividend record backs the streak claim. Hormel paid $0.29 per quarter through all of 2025 before stepping up to $0.2925 with the January 12, 2026 ex-dividend date. Compare that with earlier steps in the same series: $0.26 rising to $0.275 in early 2023, and $0.275 to $0.2825 in early 2024. Each of those was a larger bump than the current one. The streak is intact. Its slope has flattened.
Interim CEO Jeff Ettinger framed the milestone directly: "This marks an impressive milestone, 60 years of uninterrupted dividend increases at Hormel Foods, a legacy we're extremely proud of."
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For a retirement holder, a 1% raise against ongoing grocery and services inflation means real income is drifting lower even as the streak survives. The yield cushions that: shares closed at $20.83 on September 18, 2026, down 12.19% over one year and 41.22% over five years, pushing the trailing yield to roughly 5.62%.
Cash generation still covers the check. Hormel returned $161 million to stockholders in dividends in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, its 391st consecutive quarterly payout, and finished the quarter with $827 million in cash. Third quarter operating cash flow reached $240.6 million, up 53.5% year over year, with adjusted operating margin expanding to 9.0% from 8.4%. Management raised fiscal 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to $1.45 to $1.51, comfortably above the $1.17 annualized payout.
Hormel's slow-raise pattern echoes broader packaged food trends. McCormick & Company ( NYSE:MKC ), another Dividend King, has leaned on smaller annual bumps in recent years, while Kraft Heinz ( NASDAQ:KHC ) sits on the other side of the trade with a portfolio restructuring and a payout that was rebased years ago rather than grown steadily. Hormel is threading between them: streak preserved, growth deferred. (We ranked ten Dividend Kings by valuation right now in a free report you can grab here.)
The 60-year record is real, and coverage is not in doubt. A buyer today is purchasing stability and yield, backed by a 0.315 beta and disciplined cash generation, rather than the mid-single-digit dividend growth Hormel delivered earlier in the decade. The streak still means something. It just means something different now.
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