You know when you were a little kid, and your parents reminded the babysitter they couldn’t give you any C-O-O-K-I-E-S, and you knew exactly what it meant: You were obviously going to stay up late, watch big-kid movies, shove candy into your mouth, and build a fort in the living room?
Always, an inevitable shock followed: What was this broccoli doing on your plate? And why was it still light out as you got tucked into bed? And what about C-O-O-K-I-E-S, which you were sure was a codeword for a night of fun and adventure?
Turns out, you radically misinterpreted a simple phrase. To ensure you don’t make the same mistake as an adult, take it from us: When companies say they’re taking “targeted pricing actions,” what they really mean is: We’re raising prices because of tariffs. At least, most of the time.
Experts have long anticipated that President Trump’s tariffs will ultimately translate to hiked-up prices for American consumers. While that already started to play out in recent months, the impact wasn’t quite as intense as some expected.
But more recently, the ultimate consumer burden looks likely to worsen. As companies increasingly run out of alternatives, more and more are finally pulling the trigger, and taking P-R-I-C-I-N-G A-C-T-I-O-N-S.
But just as your parents directly spelled out C-O-O-K-I-ES, companies aren’t hiding the fact that they’re raising prices because of tariffs—some are just using similarly inventive language.
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Take Hormel Foods, which makes Spam and Planters nuts. In the company’s latest earnings call, CFO Jacinth Smiley said “markets worsened significantly beyond our projections,” explaining that the cost of wholesale pork has climbed 10% compared to last year, while the cost of pork bellies used for bacon jumped 30%. As a result, interim CEO Jeff Ettinger noted that in order to address this intense commodity inflation, the company would be “taking targeted pricing actions.”
It was the same story at J.M. Smucker, which owns coffee brands like Folgers and Café Bustelo. The company has already hiked up coffee prices twice this year. And when asked about future price increases in Smucker’s latest earnings call, CFO Tucker Marshall said its current outlook on coffee prices factors in “additional pricing actions in the early winter associated with the increased tariff rates that we’re experiencing on green coffee.”
And even when tariffs are absent from the conversation, “pricing action” does tend to translate to “price hike.” Take Beyond Meat. In its latest earnings call, CFO Lubi Kutua said a “slight decrease in net revenue per pound” was partially offset by “the benefit from pricing actions initiated in the year-ago period.” And if you look back at what those “pricing actions” really entailed, they were—you guessed it—price increases.
Doesn’t it feel a bit like when you realized what C-O-O-K-I-E-S really spelled?