Trends and

Strategies in
Healthy Snacking
15 key case studies

By Julian Mellentin

Published by

Report
 Healthy snacking

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Contents

Executive summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Healthy snacking: a wealth of innovation opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.1 Four factors for success in snacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 Innovation without limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3 The essential qualities needed for innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2. Key trends in healthy snacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.1 Trend 1: Naturalness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2 Trend 2: Fruit & vegetables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3 Trend 3: Higher protein, slower carbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

3. Brand positioning in healthy snacking

3.1 Targeting the right consumers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.2 Distribution & routes to market: smart thinking finds smarter ways to take
health to market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.3 Marketing communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

4. Seven strategies to increase your chances of success in healthy snacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

5. Case studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Innovation in format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Case study 1: Popchips – new product format delivers healthier chip at premium price . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Innovation in ingredients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Case study 2: Mars – exploring how to make cocoa the next ingredient success in snacks . . . . . . . . . . 53

Targeting the technology consumer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Case study 3: Probake 50 – new format brings a healthy dose of protein. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Targeting the lifestyle consumer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Case study 4: Smaller, leaner, kinder: bars tap into women’s needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Case study 5: ThinkThin Bars’ wellness platform resonates with women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Targeting the mass market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Case study 6: Kraft Belvita Breakfast – giving people permission to have a sweet snack at breakfast . . 72
Case study 7: Fiber One – an expert brand in digestive health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

“Naturalness” – the biggest trend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Case study 8: PepsiCo transforms the snack food aisle into the natural food aisle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Case study 9: Wonderful Pistachios – making natural into a super-premium success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Case study 10: Nairns – product innovation, “natural energy” from expert brand in oat-based snacks . 94

Fruit & vegetables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Case study 11: Nature Addicts – Europe’s most successful new snack brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Case study 12: Castus fruit snacks – a hit with Danish children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Case study 13: Frito-Lay’s fruit and vegetable snack brand ambitions fall to earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Case study 14: Ocean Spray – from bog fruit to big fruit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Case study 15: Berries – convenience, indulgence and “natural functionality” drive a
super-premium success story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

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Charts
Chart 1: Percent of food & beverage new product Pacesetters offering health & wellness benefits vs
historical trend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Chart 2: 2010 New product Pacesetters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Chart 3: Fruit & vegetable snack product launches 2009-2011 (YTD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Chart 4: Change in body weight during the Diogenes study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chart 5: The nutritional product life cycle – how it works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Chart 6: Technology consumers, a key segment for health brands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Chart 7: Lifestyle consumers, a key segment for health brands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Chart 8: Mass market consumers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Chart 9: Mass-market sales of Luna Bar, the leader in the women’s nutrition bar segment . . . . . 64
Chart 10: Recession-proof digestive health – the rise and rise of Fiber One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Chart 11: The nutritional product life cycle – how trends evolve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Chart 12: The irresistible rise of the Wonderful snack brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Chart 13: The decline and fall of Flat Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Chart 14: US sales of Ocean Spray Craisins 2004-2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Chart 15: Health and convenience enables the lowest volume product to command the
highest value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Chart 16: Berries – the super premium success story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Tables
Table 1: Popchips and Flat Earth: a comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Table 2: Label messages for healthy snacks in our case studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18-19
Table 3: Popchips – A comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Table 4: What’s in Probake50? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Table 5: Tasty organic pumpkin pie cereal bar nutrition facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Table 6: Nutrition and ingredients facts for ThinkThin protein bar (dark chocolate) . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Table 7: Fiber One Oat & Chocolate bar ingredients & nutrition facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Table 8: Lay’s “All-natural” potato chips ingredients & nutrition facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Table 9: Ingredients and nutrition facts for Castus fruit bars (strawberry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Table 10: US and UK berry sales to May 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

Boxes
Box 1: Portion control a “win win” strategy in snacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Box 2: Naturalness is a key element in brand success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Box 3: Even Mars chooses ingredients with a health halo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Box 4: Slow release carbs message from Kraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

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Box 5: Simply Eight keeps it simple for consumers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Box 6: Applied Nutritional Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Box 7: Slow release energy a key part of Kraft Brand positioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Box 8: Belvita TV advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Box 9: Natural foods are the new standard in the supermarket: Pepsico’s stated goal is to transform the
snack aisle into a natural food aisle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Box 10: Wonderful Pistachios’ quirky television advertising. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Box 11: Oats’ natural “slow release energy” advantage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Box 12: Creating a free-from advantage for oat snacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Box 13: Televison advertising for N.A! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Box 14: Ocean Spray Craisins advert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Box 15: Good merchandising boosts Craisins sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Companies and brands in this report

Apure Foods Frito-Lay PepsiCo

Balance Bar General Mills Pom Wonderful
Be Fruity Good Natured Fruit Popchips
Belvita Goodness Knows Probake
Campbell’s V8 Iron Girl Energy Bar Quaker Oats
Castus Kind Healthy Snacks Red Bull
Clif Kraft Simply Eight
Coca-Cola Luna Solinest
CocoaPro Marathon Smart Stuff Snack a Jacks
CocoaVia Mars Sunsweet Ones
Danone Nairns Tasty
Driscolls Nature Addicts thinkThin
Eat.Think.Smile Nestlé Wonderful Pistachios
Fiber One Ocean Spray Craisins
Flat Earth Paramount Farms

Continents/Countries in this report

NORTH AMERICA EUROPE
USA France
Canada Scotland
Denmark
Belgium
Netherlands
UK

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Executive summary

• Snacking is the over-arching trend in food and health: it is affecting every

category, every type of food and blurring boundaries between categories as consumers
evaluate multiple choices in the supermarket – including those not in the snacking aisle –
as potential convenient snacks.

• Demand for snack products is increasing: demand can only grow because longer
working hours, longer commutes, single-person households and an increase in the
numbers of women working are leading to the decline of traditional meal occasions.
Even in countries like Italy and France, more meals are being taken on-the-run.

• Success factors: for companies looking to create snack products, there are four factors
for success:
– Excellent taste.
– Extreme convenience.
– Single-serve.
– No limits on innovation in packaging, ingredients or product formats.

• Taste paramount: in snacks, taste still rules. No one will compromise taste for health.
Snacks often play a psychological role, providing comfort during a stressful or boring day
at the office, or on the road – and they have to taste good to make you feel better.

• No limits on innovation: given the convergence of innovation in processing

technologies and ingredients with consumer need, any company with an ambition in
healthy snacks should not rule out ideas because they are unfamiliar or “too innovative”.
Any material that can be dried, extruded, frozen, shaped, poured, pureed, or whatever, to
deliver a good-tasting, healthy food or beverage snack should be considered.

• Innovation in formats: in many segments of the snacking market it’s difficult to

create any meaningful point of difference. Using technology to create a new product
format is one way to achieve differentiation. Examples in this report include Popchips
(Case Study 1) and Nairns (Case Study 10).

• Build new concepts: a focus on building markets for new snack concepts rather than
following on with predictable products has led to some innovative snacking concepts,
such as: Popchips (Case Study 1); Probake 50 (Case Study 3); Fiber One (Case Study 7);
Nairns’ Oaty Bakes (Case Study 10) and Nature Addicts (Case Study 11).

• Innovation in marketing: probably the most important type of innovation. It is

difficult to create a sustainable point of difference in snacking, even with innovations
in formats, benefits or ingredients. The job of the marketer is to educate the consumer
about new benefits, ingredients or formats and to use these to create a strong and
differentiated brand.

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• Invest in marketing: on today’s crowded supermarket shelves it is difficult to stand

out. The most successful brands sell themselves before the consumer even sets foot in the
supermarket. Case Study 6 shows how Kraft Belvita Biscuits used marketing to achieve
the seemingly impossible, selling the idea of biscuits as part of a healthy breakfast in a
country in which biscuits are never consumed at breakfast.

• Transforming a snack commodity with marketing: Paramount Farms, the

company behind Wonderful Pistachios (Case Study 9), used marketing to transform
pistachios from a boring commodity into one of the most successful snacking stories of
the decade. Sales grew 26% in the year to June 2011, to over $153 million (€107 million)
and the brand has driven half the total sales increase in the US snack nuts market.

• Innovation in ingredients: marketers and formulators tend to be very focused on

what’s the “hit” ingredient to differentiate their product. In reality any ingredient can
be a success as long as it’s matched to the product format in a way that’s logical to the
consumer and delivers a benefit that’s attractive to the consumer. For example, Mars
(Case Study 2) is testing ways of bringing the “new health ingredient” of cocoa to market
in new snack formats that might make sense to the consumer, an acknowledgement that
consumers are willing to look at cocoa as a new health ingredient but they have yet to
find a differentiated and credible delivery vehicle for it.

• Snacking Trend 1 – naturalness: in most Western markets “natural” is becoming a

basic consumer requirement for any brand, even those without an overt health position.
What were once messages in the health food store have become mainstream in every
supermarket. Case Study 8, on PepsiCo, illustrates how mainstream this requirement
has become. In 2011 the world’s biggest snack-food company reformulated its products
so that half the snacks it sells in the US use only natural ingredients. So big is Frito-Lay
in the US market that this means “natural” products will have a 65% share of the $3.1
billion (€2.1 billion) snack food market.

• What is “Natural”? “Natural” has two meanings in snacking:

1. Natural = few ingredients, simple ingredients. “Natural” is not used in

a technical or regulatory sense – it is a consumer definition, meaning foods that
are “free-from” artificial colours, preservatives or additives. It can also be used to
encompass foods that are free-from other ingredients that your target consumers
object to – in the US, for example, objections by some consumers to high-fructose
corn syrup have lead to a “No HFCS” label appearing commonly on “natural”
products. Of our 15 case studies, nine mention that they are “free-from” one or more
of gluten, wheat, soy or another “undesirable ingredient” . “Natural” can also mean
“as few ingredients as possible”.

2. Natural = “natural functionality”. For many consumers a health benefit that is

intrinsic to the product – such as oats and heart health, blueberries and antioxidants
– is the only one they will accept. Such foods are seeing increasing use in snacks and
this trend can only strengthen. The Wonderful Pistachios brand illustrates how to
communicate “natural functionality” to consumers.

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• Snacking Trend 2: fruit & vegetables enjoy a halo of health: more than any
other foods, fruits and vegetables have a halo of health that’s being made brighter by
a steady stream of news about their natural and intrinsic benefits. Fruit, in particular,
is benefiting from the “naturally functional” preference of consumers. To some extent
vegetables, too, are starting to benefit from the same trend as snack processing technology
improves. Case Studies that illustrate this trend are: Nature Addicts (Case Study 11);
Castus (Case Study 12); Ocean Spray Cranberries (Case Study 14) and Berries (Case
Study 15).

• Fruit at super-premium prices: what is striking is how much consumers are willing
to pay for fruit when it’s convenient, as shown in the case study of Nature Addicts (Case
Study 11), which has become the most successful new snack brand in Europe, despite
selling at super-premium prices against the backdrop of a weak economy.

• Snacking Trend 3: higher protein, slower carbs: still at an early stage is the
concept of “good carbs”, “slow carbs” or “low glycemic index (GI)”. However, the trend
is clear and a growing science base for these messages will see their use in healthy snacks
increase in the years ahead.

• Boost for protein: Protein’s image as a valuable part of a healthy diet got a major
boost following the publicity around the results of the world’s largest diet study. The
researchers found that high-protein, low-glycemic index (GI) diets were the most effective
for weight management. The quality and scale of the study has attracted significant
media attention and it is already having an impact on food marketing and product
design. It will accelerate the existing trend to use whole grains in product formulation.

• Slow carbs: Whole grains – “good carbs” – and low-GI also connect to slowly rising
consumer interest in the idea of “sustained energy”. The “slow release” energy message
is in fact in marketing terms quite an old message. It’s only recently that science has given
the message more weight. Several of the brands in our Case Studies use a “slow release
energy” or “sustained energy” message. Nairn’s (Case Study 10), an expert brand in oat
snacks, has made the slow energy release properties of oats a key message in its brand
marketing. Kraft Belvita Breakfast Biscuits (Case Study 6) has focused heavily on a “slow
release” message in its marketing. Thinking about whether and how to create products
that have “better carbs” will have to be on every company’s NPD agenda.

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1. Healthy snacking: a wealth of innovation
opportunities
Snacking is the over-arching trend in food
and health, affecting every category, every
type of food and creating a blurring of
boundaries between categories as consumers
evaluate multiple choices in the supermarket
– including those not in the snacking aisle – as
potential convenient snacks.
Demand for snack products is increasing
and can only grow more because of the
gradual disappearance of traditional meal
occasions. Longer working hours, longer
commutes, single-parent families, single-
person households and an increase in the
numbers of women working are all leading
to the disappearance of traditional meal
occasions. Even in countries like Italy and
France, more meals and snacks are being
taken alone and/or on-the-run.
Healthy snack products targeting breakfast,
for example, have promise because this is
one time of day when consumers want to eat
healthily – yet are under time pressure.
1.1 FOUR FACTORS FOR SUCCESS
IN SNACKING
For companies looking to create snack
products, there are four factors for success:
1. Excellent taste.
2. Extreme convenience.
3. Single-serve.
4. No limits on innovation in packaging,
ingredients or product formats.
1. Taste. In snacks, taste still rules and no
one is willing to compromise taste for health.
In addition snacks often play a psychological
role, providing comfort during a stressful or
boring day at the office, or on the road – and
they have to taste good to make you feel
better.
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Healthy snacking
2. & 3. Convenience and single-serve:
Products which you can grab for a morning
or afternoon snack, which fit neatly in your
pocket or bag and which don’t require a
change in eating habits are the main growth
categories. Snacks need to be portable and
single-serve, since snacking is most often
a solitary activity. For instance, the biggest
growth in nutritional products in recent years
is in bars and single-serve beverages.
Fruit in particular benefits from being
delivered in a more convenient form – a snack
or drink – than its natural form, something
marketers are beginning to flag up for
consumers.
4. Innovation without limits. Consumers’
growing interest in the healthfulness of what
they eat couples with a wealth of innovations
in ingredients, and processing is having a
massive impact on new product development
in the area of snacking. Today, consumers
are increasingly presented with snack product
formats and ingredients that would have been
unimaginable even as recently as five years
ago. It’s this concept of “innovation without
limits” that we explore in the following
section.
1.2 INNOVATION WITHOUT LIMITS
Given the convergence of innovation in
processing technologies and ingredients
with consumer need, any company with an
ambition in healthy snacks should not rule
out NPD ideas because they are unfamiliar or
“too innovative”.
A focus on building markets for new snack
concepts rather than simply following on
with predictable products has already led
to the creation of some innovative snacking
concepts, such as:
 Healthy snacking

• Probake 50 (Case Study 3) short-term success, followed by stagnation;

• Nature Addicts (Case Study 11)
• Fiber One (Case Study 7)
• Popchips (Case Study 1)
• Nairns’ Oaty Bakes (Case Study 10)
Almost any material that can be dried,
extruded, frozen, shaped, poured, pureed, or
whatever, to deliver a good-tasting, healthy
food or beverage snack should be considered
by product developers.
Just to make the challenge more
complicated, consumer research is no longer
able to tell companies in advance exactly what
they should be delivering – the emphasis now
is on creating innovative propositions beyond
consumers’ imaginations and then building
consumer demand for them.
Sustaining consumers’ interest: That
consumers seem to need constant variety in
their snack choices, particularly solid food
snacks, has a downside. Many snack brands
seem to go through cycles of growth and
a host of product and flavour innovations
to create new consumer interest followed by
years of patchy performance.
For example, PepsiCo thought back in 2000
that its Snack a Jacks rice snack brand could
become a $160 million/€115 million business
in the UK. In fact, by 2010 it had reached
only half that level. But getting even to that
point has been a major achievement, driven
by constant new product development, a
female-focused brand positioning, wholegrain
credentials and heavyweight marketing
expenditure. It’s an example that vividly
illustrates how creating healthy snacks that
satisfy consumers and keep their loyalty is one
of the toughest challenges.
Because it is difficult to create a sustainable
point of difference in healthy snacking,
innovation is key to success. Innovation can
take many forms, and we explore five of these
in the following section:
1. Innovation in formats
2. Innovation in marketing

BOX 1: PORTION CONTROL A “WIN WIN” STRATEGY IN SNACKING

An important element in snacking strategy is recognizing that consumers are looking for help with
portion control. In the US hundreds of snacks sell as “100-calorie packs”, but many hundreds more do
not make the calorie count a major flag on the front of the label, but do deliver a low calorie count. In
Europe 100-calorie packs are also common but are not necessarily flagged up as such (see Case Study
ll, Nature’s Addict).

Professor Brian Wansink, a food psychologist and nutrition expert whom many credit with the idea for
100-calorie packs, told New Nutrition Business that: “It’s been a tremendous win-win for companies
and consumers. Companies sell these products to those who otherwise wouldn’t have bought their stuff.
And every study we’ve seen shows that consumers certainly eat less on a given usage occasion.”

For snack producers, controlled-calorie packs have three attractions:

• the serving-size packages bring them higher return-on-investment than regular varieties do
(100-calorie packages can be up to 20% more profitable than the equivalent amount of product
sold in a full-size pack)

• they draw new customers into brands and product lines

• and they provide a reasonable basis for companies to claim that they’re offering better-for-you
options for American consumers

Fielding lower calorie-count packages brings its share of challenges, particularly in product formulation.
Smaller sizes of the same products, for example, require different recipes and different baking times.

5 www.new-nutrition.com

3. Innovation in packaging
4. Innovation in benefits
5. Innovation in ingredients
1.2.1 INNOVATION IN FORMATS
In many segments of the snacking market it’s
difficult to create any meaningful point of
difference. Bars, for example, are a sector in
which any new entrant can easily disappear
from sight among the “wall of bars” in the
supermarket. Using technology to create a
new product format is one way to achieve
differentiation.
Examples in this report include:
Popchips (Case Study 1): the company
uses heat and pressure to “pop” potato chips,
similar to popping corn or other starchy
materials, instead of baking or frying them,
which are the standard ways of treating
potato chips. The technology allows Popchips
to use less oil than standard chips, giving the
finished product half the fat
of fried or even baked chips,
as well as fewer calories. The
popping also gives a different
taste and texture which is a hit
with consumers.
Nairns (Case Study 10): A
company which is focused solely on marketing
snacks based on oats, Nairns decided to move
beyond the traditional formats of cookies
and crackers and create a totally new format
– the oat-based chip. Development took
two years. Called Oaty Bakes, these potato
chip-like products, but made with 100% oats
instead of potatoes,
are a true innovation.
The product
enabled Nairns to
take its brand out
of the cookie and
cracker aisle of the
supermarket into
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Healthy snacking
the snacking aisle and today it is in national
distribution in mainstream supermarkets in
the UK, as well as in selected international
markets. Oaty Bakes, billed as “Naturally
energising”, score high on health, with a fat
content of just 3.9g and only 99 calories per
23g serve – compared to 8.3g of fat per 25g
for a brand of mainstream potato chips. The
products also score highly on flavour, and
flavours are changed periodically to maintain
consumer interest.
1.2.2 INNOVATION IN MARKETING
This is probably the most important type
of innovation. It is difficult to create a
sustainable point of difference in snacking,
even with innovations in formats, benefits
or ingredients. The job of the marketer is to
educate the consumer about the new benefits,
ingredients or formats and to use these to
create a strong and differentiated brand.
At the same time marketing investment
has to be significant. On today’s crowded
supermarket shelves it is difficult to stand out
and so the most successful brands are those
which make sure they sell themselves to the
consumer before the consumer even sets
foot in the supermarket. Regrettably, there
are still many food and beverage companies
who believe that you can market products
with health benefits on a tight budget – you
can, of course, but you will also not be very
successful. There are no success stories in
health that were “made on a shoestring”.
Case studies in this report include:
Kraft Belvita (Case Study 6): Kraft
achieved the seemingly impossible with
Belvita of selling the idea of
biscuits as part of a healthy
breakfast in a country – the
UK – in which biscuits are
never consumed at breakfast.
This represented an attempt
to create a new place in the

biscuit market for a new brand (Belvita had
previously only been on sale in France and
Belgium) by creating a new consumption
occasion. This innovation in product
positioning required a significant commitment
to marketing to make it work and Kraft
invested £3 million ($4.8 million/€3.5 million)
in the UK launch, with a TV campaign that
features breakfast radio presenters, Johnny
Vaughan and Lisa Snowdon, in-studio and
plays on the duo’s personalities and playful
breakfast show banter. The biscuits are
unveiled as “a totally new way of having
some breakfast” and the advert ends with
the tagline: “Belvita BREAKFAST – biscuits
specially designed for breakfast”. The TV
campaign was accompanied by an eight-week
print campaign, and integrated with PR, an
advertorial programme, retail promotions and
sampling as well as outdoor digital ads in high
profile sites throughout London. The brand
earned over £20 million ($33 million/€23
million) in retail sales in its first year.
Wonderful Pistachios (Case Study 9):
Paramount Farms has used marketing to
transform pistachios from a boring snack
commodity into one of the most successful
snacking stories of the last decade. The
company’s 2010 advertising budget was
$20 million (€14 million), compared to $15
million (€10.5 million) the previous year. The
company has invested in 2,000 airings of its
TV commercials, targeting women aged 30
to 50. It has recruited B-list and “naughty”
celebrities such as a star of
the hit TV series Jersey Shore
to front its advertising. The
brand uses a consistent bright
green imagery and focuses
on delivering “a meaningful
health message without
getting overly complicated”
with health messaging about
pistachios as “the lowest-fat
nut” and the “lowest calorie
nut”.
7 www.new-nutrition.com
Healthy snacking
1.2.3 INNOVATION IN PACKAGING
Packaging design can be used to change
consumers’ perceptions of a category, or even
create a new category. Packaging innovation is
commonly used to achieve this in beverages,
but in snacking true packaging innovation is
rare.
One of the very few examples is Sunsweet
Ones – an example of how better packaging,
marketing and merchandising has helped a
traditional fruit break away from its lowly
commodity status and earn much higher retail
prices.
Back in 2007 Sunsweet, the world’s biggest
producer of prunes, launched a repackaging
and repositioning of its prunes as individually-
wrapped snacking treats in a bid to change
the perceptions of consumers whose narrow
view of prunes was firmly encrusted in time
and tradition.
Steve Harris, Sunsweet’s vice president of
marketing, told New Nutrition Business at the
time that: “The key to our approach here is
getting people to appreciate prunes for their
benefits other than digestive health, and they
truly realise this when you compare prunes
to other fruits. So we’re aiming not only for
more social acceptance of eating them but
also making it more easy and convenient.”
The launch of Sunsweet
Ones was intended to “put
prunes in a whole different
light for consumers”.
Twenty individually
wrapped Ones are
packed in a 7oz canister.
“This makes a different
impression than finding
them in a big tub where
they’re all stuck together,”
Harris explained to New
Nutrition Business at the time of the brand’s
launch.
He continued: “Many consumers think of
candy when they see Ones in their individual
wrappings. And we use only our largest and

best fruit for this product: if someone is going
to eat one prune at a time, we want to make
sure they get their fruit’s worth.”
By 2010, within four years of the
introduction of the packaging Sunsweet
Ones had become a $15 million (€10.6
million) product in US supermarkets, mass
merchandisers and drug stores (not including
Walmart stores) surveyed by SymphonyIRI, a
Chicago-based firm that collects supermarket
scanning data.
Premium price to prunes, competitive
with snacks. Ones retail for around $2.99
(€2.32) for a cylindrical, 7oz (200g) canister
of 20 individually paper-wrapped, top-grade
prunes, equivalent to $0.48/oz (€1.66 per
100g). By comparison a 24oz (680g) canister
of traditionally packed prunes retails for $4.49
(€3.50), equivalent to $0.18/oz (€0.51/100g),
putting the Ones at a 100% premium to
bulk prunes. The packaging and convenience
elements are what have enabled Ones to earn
such a premium over “regular prunes”.
1.2.4 INNOVATION IN BENEFITS
Too often product developers and marketers
start by thinking about what ingredients will
be interesting to consumers. While some
ingredients are interesting, the reason is
because consumers connect them with a
benefit in their own minds. The benefit need
not be specific, it can even be as generalised
as “antioxidants”, which most consumers
think of in broad terms as having benefits for
skin health or heart health.
This is a key point – benefits are
consumers’ primary motivation for buying a
product, once it has met the requirements of
taste and convenience.
Finding a consumer need for a benefit that
is not being met – or is under-served – is key
to helping create a point of difference for
your product. It may even be possible to bring
a completely new benefit to the market in a
snack, or to bring in a snack form a benefit
8 www.new-nutrition.com
Healthy snacking
that is currently only available to consumers
in a product format that is less convenient or
does not have good taste.
Examples of products focused strongly on
creating new benefit platforms are:
Fiber One – fibre for digestive health
(Case Study 7): While many bars and
snacks offer 20% of the RDA of fibre, very
few are bold enough to go to 35% of the
RDA – or higher – and make the benefits of
fibre the primary benefit of the brand. At
this dosage the fibre provides a benefit you
can feel, a key success factor in marketing
many health products. And it has been very
successful for General Mills’ Fiber One
bars. They are part of a larger brand which
incorporates breakfast cereals and yoghurts
in the range, but the snack bars still account
for 60% of total brand sales of almost $300
million. As the case study shows, by setting
itself up as the “expert brand” in fibre for
digestive health and
being the first brand
to do so Fiber One
brought a new benefit
to consumers.
ProBake 50 (Case
Study 1): The ageing of the population
of the Western countries is well-known, but
many Asian countries, especially China, are
also witnessing a rapid growth in the numbers
of over-50s. “Seniors” are a key target group
for every company with ambitions in health.
A wealth of health issues crystallise for people
as they age, and one of the most significant
is sarcopenia – muscle wastage, a condition
that affects every person after the age of
60 and becomes a serious issue for 50% of
over-70s. The body’s
ability to absorb protein
declines with age, and
a wealth of companies
are researching how to
get more easy-to-absorb
dairy protein into seniors’

diets. Much of this has focused on beverages,
however older people prefer formats that are
more relevant to their lifestyle – and Probake
50 is an example of a product developed
to deliver a high dose of protein – around
37.5g per 75g cookies. For senior consumers,
a snack cookie that brings the benefit of
protein is a more valid solution to their health
concern than other product types.
Nature Addicts – a serving of fruit
(Case Study 11): French confectionery giant
Solinest made its first-ever move into snacks
with the creation of the Nature Addicts
brand. It represented a completely new
benefit in the French market: a convenient
100% fruit snack, with a clear all-natural
position with “no added sugars, colourings,
preservatives, flavours” and the message
that the brand – which comes in bars and
as 100-calorie pack bites – is 100% fruit
and a great way to get the benefits of fruit
when you don’t have any fresh fruit handy.
The company launched the brand with a
significant marketing effort and above all an
excellent merchandising strategy, positioning
Nature Addicts products in impulse settings in
supermarkets, convenience stores and petrol
stations. As the case study shows,
despite premium pricing it has
been a major success.
Think Thin (Case Study
5) – weight management
for women: With women
accounting for 75% of the purchases in the
US nutrition bar market, it makes sense for
bars to focus more directly on benefits that
matter most to women. One of the few bars
to have done so is thinkThin, which blends an
all-natural and weight management message
in a way that resonates with women – high
protein, low/no-sugar and gluten-free are
core promises of the brand. ThinkThin bars
are positioned as
being about a healthy
lifestyle rather than
9 www.new-nutrition.com
Healthy snacking
about weight loss. The product marketing
material describes weight wellness as “an
optimal weight range at which our bodies
feel healthy and happy. This is not defined
or dictated by aesthetic, shape, weight or
tape measure.” Bars have no more than 200
calories, while portion-controlled Bites have
only 100 calories. To keep creating new
consumer interest through innovation the
company is also working on snacks in the salty
and savoury snack categories.
1.2.5 INNOVATION IN INGREDIENTS
In industry marketers and formulators tend to
be very focused on what’s the “hit” ingredient
to differentiate their product. However, in
reality any ingredient can be a success as long
as it’s matched to the product format in a way
that’s logical to the consumer and delivers a
benefit that’s attractive to the consumer.
The most marked ingredient trend is
for snacks marketed for their intrinsic
healthfulness and perceived naturalness.
Perceived health benefits from “naturally
healthy” ingredients is an easy concept
for consumers to understand. Hence oats,
almonds, cranberries, blueberries and many
other foods are seeing increasing use in snacks
and this trend can only strengthen.
Mars (Case Study 2) – finding a
logical fit for chocolate: Mars wants
to market the intrinsic health benefits of
cocoa but it also knows that it cannot market
chocolate confectionery for health benefits.
“Healthy chocolate” runs strongly counter to

chocolate’s image of pleasure and indulgence,
as the company has already found in test-
marketing.
Nor can it achieve the best point of
difference for a new health ingredient simply
by adding it to existing products formats, such
as bars.
Instead Mars is testing ways of bringing the
“new health ingredient” of cocoa to market
in new formats that might make sense to
the consumer. For more than a year Mars
has been test-marketing GoodnessKnows,
a line of snack squares that is a hybrid of
confection, nutrition bar and muesli bar. They
include whole almonds, fruits, whole grains
and what Mars calls “deep chocolate”, with
200mg of Mars’ patented cocoa flavanols in
each four-square serving.
The idea behind the product is that
consumers are willing to look at cocoa
flavanols as a new health ingredient but they
have yet to find a differentiated and credible
delivery vehicle for this new ingredient.
Flat Earth (Case Study 13) – vegetables,
not fruit, a logical fit: PepsiCo’s Flat
Earth line of salty snacks, based on fruits and
vegetables, also encountered the challenge
of matching the ingredient and the format.
Introduced in early 2007 and targeted at
health-conscious women who normally don’t
venture down the salty snack aisle of the
supermarket, after an initial period of growth
sales flattened and then fell off by about 16%.
The reason was that women weren’t buying
the fruit-based varieties of chips – and the
company had to discontinue them.
Only the vegetable-based varieties caught
on with consumers. “Fruit crisps had a
strong following, but it was
narrow,” said a company
spokesperson. “Their appeal
wasn’t as broad as with
veggies, which were really
compelling. Women engaged
with them.”
Fruit, in short, with its
10
Healthy snacking
sweet image, is not a logical pairing with
a salty snack product. PepsiCo decided to
focus on vegetables – which are a logical fit
– introducing new varieties and new package
designs which had “vegetables front and
centre”. It has since discontinued the brand.
On the other hand fruit is acceptable when
it stands alone – or even in combination
with vegetables as long as the fruit taste is
dominant – with a promise that a fruit-based
snack enables you to get one or more servings
of fruit, but in a convenient format. This
message was an innovation several years ago
but now is on track to become an everyday
message in fruit snacks. Hence producers
of fruit snacks are trying to differentiate
by pairing fruits with vegetables (see Trend
2), which also has the benefit of lowering
calorific value.
Fruit, grain and nut snacks a logical fit
with digestive health: Given that digestive
health is one of the very biggest health
concerns, particularly for people over 40, and
has already given birth to a huge market for
probiotic dairy products, it isn’t surprising
that marketers are looking to snacks high in
fruit, grains and nuts as credible carriers for
high-fibre messages.
It’s become easier in recent years to
formulate fibre into foods and beverages and
as a result of advances in technology high-
fibre foods taste better than ever before, with
none of the notes of cardboard that marked
out high-fibre foods in the past.
As Case Study 7 on Fiber One shows,
consumers are receptive to “expert” snack
brands that can deliver a high and effective
dose of fibre.
Probiotics not a good fit with shelf-
stable products: But while fibre is a
credible ingredient in a snack, probiotic
bacteria are not. There are many in industry,
particularly in the US, who believe that there
are opportunities for shelf-stable products
such as bars to deliver probiotics.
www.new-nutrition.com

There are two problems with this
perspective. One is that the marketing of
the dairy industry has been so effective; its
products so good; and its connecting of
probiotics with the consumer logic of “live
and active” bacteria in yoghurt and dairy
drinks so thorough, that no other category has
been able to compete, not even other dairy
categories such as cheese.
In European probiotic cereals bars and
many other food forms have already been
attempted – mostly in Germany, Europe’s
biggest and longest-established probiotic
market – and almost all have disappeared
from the market or survive as very marginal
brands.
Interestingly, the same lesson is now being
re-learnt in the US, where marketers have
long struggled to transfer lessons from other
markets into an American context. One of
the biggest failures comes from Kraft Foods,
whose LiveActive probiotic brand has “turned
out to be a disappointment to us”.
Kraft executive Basil Maglaris confirmed
to New Nutrition Business that sales of the
company’s probiotic bars were below
expectations, producing less than $20 million
(€14 million) in retail sales in its first year. Its
smaller competitor, Attune, is another brand
that has failed to persuade consumers – retail
Attempts to create probiotic solid foods for digestive health – such as Kraft’s Live Active probiotic cereal bar and its smaller
competitor, Attune – have failed to persuade consumers. By comparison, sales of Fiber One digestive health cereal bars in the
year to May 2009 were over $130 million (€92 million) – that’s more than four times the combined sales of all the competing
probiotic bars.
11
Healthy snacking
sales are said to be static at less than $10
million (€7 million), five years after it was first
launched.
To put this into some kind of context, total
US sales of Fiber One digestive health cereal
bars in the year to May 2011 were over $150
million (€92 million) – that’s more than four
times the combined sales of all the competing
probiotic bars.
Probiotics are not something that’s seen
as natural in solid foods – even when the
technology allows it.
1.3 THE ESSENTIAL QUALITIES
NEEDED FOR INNOVATION
How do you measure the success of an
innovation? Part of the answer to that
question depends on who is doing the
measuring. How else, for example, could two
companies launch innovative snack products
that achieve similar levels of retail sales, yet
one company describes its brand as a success
and the basis for future growth while the
other sees it as a disappointment and decides
to withdraw support from its brand?
The difference in perspective is, in this case,
accounted for by the fact that one of these
companies is an entrepreneurial start-up and
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 Healthy snacking

the other an established corporate giant.
As our case studies of Popchips (Case Study
1) and PepsiCo’s Flat Earth (Case Study 13)
show, both the entrepreneurs behind Popchips
and the corporate giant behind Flat Earth
(PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay business, which launched
Flat Earth, is the world’s biggest snack
company) were targeting the same consumer
need – the need for snacks that have good
taste and are healthy, lower in calories,
sodium and saturated fat, and interesting for
restless consumers who are always on the

TABLE 1: POPCHIPS AND FLAT EARTH: A COMPARISON

POPCHIPS FLAT EARTH

Popchips’ proposition is
simple: using heat and Flat Earth chips
pressure to “pop” potato contain a half-
chips instead of bake or serving of fruits or
fry them cuts calories veggies per per 28g
and allows Popchips to (6oz) bag. Each 2g
PRODUCT
cram more chips into a serving has less
given volume than if they’re fried. than 5g of fat and
Popchips have less than half the fat about 130 calories. Rice or potato
of fried and even baked chips. Per -flake-based chips, which are
serving, Popchips provides 4g of fat and baked, not fried.
120 calories.

The suggested retail price is

$2.99 (€2.38) for a 6oz bag,
A premium price that typically is $1.29
PRICING a small premium over Fritos,
(€1.02) for a single-serving 1oz bag. PepsiCo’s market-leading potato
chip brand.
Placement and merchandising
decisions are especially crucial for
Popchips because it doesn’t have
national advertising campaigns.
Sampling is important and Popchips
targets venues ranging from local
Mainstream distribution in the
PROMOTION races to international events such as
snacking aisle.
the Sundance Film Festival. Popchips
also uses social media. In regular
supermarkets, Popchips takes pains to
be included in the natural foods aisle
set rather than the conventional salty-
snacks aisle.
After peaking at $26-$30 million
The company is on its way to $40
(€21-€24 million) in 2007, its
million (€32 million) in sales this year,
first year on the market, PepsiCo
after revenues of $19 million (€15
SALES seemed to lose interest and sales
million) in 2009, its second full year in
cratered to only about $5 million
operation.
(€4 million) for the 52 weeks
ended June 13 2010.

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 Healthy snacking

look-out for variety and something new in
their snack choices.
Both used technological innovations –
PepsiCo with ingredients such as vegetables
and fruit which produce a very different chip
from conventional potato chips, and Popchips
with a processing technique which produces
a potato chip, but one that’s different from
anything previously seen in the snack aisle.
As Table 1 shows, both innovations quickly
achieved very respectable levels of sales. The
difference in perspective is attributable to the
very different innovation criteria of the two
companies.
The late Professor Peter Drucker of
Harvard Business School was one of the
best-known writers on innovation of the 20th
century and his book, Principles of Innovation,
is a standard textbook. Among the criteria
Drucker sets out for successful innovation are
some which, it seems, will almost always trip
up large companies and which explain why
innovations in food and health usually come
from small start-ups.
Innovations, says Drucker, should be
capable of being started small and should
be aimed at “only a small limited market”.
Taking an innovation to market, he adds,
requires patience because you will need time
to make the adjustments and changes to your
product, because at first “innovations rarely
are more than almost right”. The necessary
changes can be made only if the scale is
small.
The other conditions Drucker says are
essential for success are:
• Diligence
• Persistence
• Commitment
Popchips seems to perform well against

Eat.Think.Smile is one of the many innovative ways that major companies are trying to create new snack concepts. This brand is part of
Apure Foods, which is in turn part of the giant Hershey confectionery group, and its aim is to bring the health benefits of cocoa in snack
forms which are more acceptable to consumers as a healthy snack than traditional chocolate confectionery. It’s an example of innovation
in format, ingredients and marketing.

13 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

all of Drucker’s criteria. And while it’s true
that with Flat Earth PepsiCo was seemingly
attempting to act like an entrepreneurial
innovator (for example, making adjustments
and changes to the product soon after launch)
it’s nevertheless difficult, perhaps impossible,
for a company of PepsiCo’s size to “start
small” and then persist.
That’s not because it lacks the skills – it’s
a company with an abundance of talented
and entrepreneurial individuals – but because
top management in all large enterprises is
impatient for fast results. So investing to
patiently building up a brand to $100 million
in sales over five or 10 years is, in the eyes
of most CEOs, a failure. But for a start-up
company such a long road is usually built into
the business plan – and achieving even half
that number would be the proof of success.
The qualities of “persistence” and
“commitment” hold no value the moment
that your boss’s number one success criteria
is “become a big success, fast”. And until the
current generation of boards of directors
grasps that the landscape of the food and
beverage industry has changed, that creating
a successful mass brand – as was a common
and viable goal 20 years ago – is now the
(near-unattainable) exception, and that a
landscape that is filled with a plethora of
niche brands is the “new normal”, many
innovations will founder.
It seems that few large companies create
new categories or commercialise innovations
– the energy drink market, for example, was
not created by a household-name company or
a corporate giant but by an entrepreneurial
company, Red Bull, which was a 10-person
start-up back in the late 1980s.
Red Bull began by aiming at a limited
market – 18-25-year-olds in bars and night-
clubs – and slowly grew its popularity with
diligence, patience and single-minded
commitment. Only much later – some 10
years after Red Bull debuted in the West –
did the big beverage groups enter the energy
market, by which time they were unable to
dislodge Red Bull from its established market
leadership.
Big beverage groups played no part in
creating the energy drink market, nor did
they create the energy shot market (which
was pioneered in the US by 5-Hour Energy, a
small entrepreneurial company which defined
and still leads the category).
Combine corporates’ tendency to play
it safe with their expectations of rapid and
large returns and you have a recipe for
disappointment.
Innovation is an essential part of how any
business, even the largest, must renew itself
if it’s not to end up losing its dominance.
One thing that’s clear is that in most large
companies there needs to be a shift in attitude
to risk and innovation – and a willingness
to embrace “starting small”, coupled with
Drucker’s virtues of diligence, persistence and
commitment.

RULES FOR SUCCESS IN HEALTHY SNACKING

• Use ingredients with a natural health halo and intrinsic health benefit.
• In snacks you are not just competing in your own category; in the mind of
consumers you are competing with every other category in the supermarket
that they could use as a snack. You cannot think in the “silo” of your own
category, because consumers don’t.
• Therefore innovating in packaging, merchandising, ingredients, formulation and
delivery system are all essential to success.

14 www.new-nutrition.com

2. Key trends in healthy snacking
2.1 TREND 1: NATURALNESS
In most Western markets “natural” is becoming
almost a basic consumer requirement for the
label of any brand, even those without an overt
health position. What were once messages in the
health food store have become mainstream in
every supermarket.
Case Study 8, on PepsiCo, illustrates how
mainstream this requirement has become. In
February 2011 the world’s biggest snack-food
company announced that it was reformulating
its products so that half the snacks it sells in the
US will use only natural ingredients, a process it
intends to have completed by the end of 2011.
So big is Frito-Lay in the US market that this
means “natural” products will have a 6% share
of the $3.1 billion (€2.1 billion) snack food
market and a 40% share of the $2.2 billion (€1.5
billion) tortilla chip market.
All Frito-Lay products now carry a stamp
reading:
Made with natural ingredients. No artificial flavours.
NO MSG. No preservatives.
In support of its move Frito-Lay cited
consumer research that claimed that the health
attribute “natural” is the second most-popular
with American female shoppers aged 20-50, with
30% of Americans actively seeking snacks with a
“no preservatives” message.
Market researchers Mintel agree, saying that
natural (in the sense of no artificial additives) is
important to 98% of frequent snackers and 62%
of all snackers.
SymphonyIRI’s report New Product Pacesetters:
carving out growth in a down economy, shows the
extent to which the “natural” message has
become mainstream.
SymphonyIRI’s “Pacesetters” are brands
which have passed more than $7.5 million (€5.2
million) in measured retail sales in their first full
year.
15
Healthy snacking
In fact, says SymphonyIRI, the “vast majority
of new products don’t even reach $7.5 million
in sales during their first year”. In fact just 25%
of new product launches manage to make it past
this modest target.
Of SymphonyIRI’s 10 biggest Pacesetter
brands – those which have achieved year-one
sales of more than $50 million (€34 million),
a group which it says account for just 2%
of all new products – several have a natural
positioning. As Chart 1 on page 17 shows, 30%
of its Pacesetter brands offer “Natural” benefits –
the single most-common benefit.
Chobani Greek Yogurt, for example, markets
itself as “nothing but good” and free-from
artificial. Nature’s Pride bread brand, fourth on
Symphony IRI’s list, also relies on strong natural
benefits (see illustration on page 17). As the
report observes, products like this are responding
to “consumers’ passion for all-natural foods”.
2.1.1 WHAT EXACTLY IS MEANT BY
“NATURAL”?
“Natural” has many meanings in snacking – all
of them dictated by the consumer and none
based on technical or regulatory definitions.
Here are the two broad categories – different, yet
entirely complementary – of “naturalness”:
1. Natural = few ingredients, simple
ingredients
“Natural” is not used in a technical or
regulatory sense – it is a consumer definition,
meaning foods that are “free-from” artificial
colours, preservatives or additives. It can also be
used to encompass foods that are free-from other
ingredients that your target consumers object
to – in the US, for example, objections by some
consumers to high-fructose corn syrup have lead
to a “No HFCS” label appearing commonly on
“natural” products.
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 Healthy snacking

Although there are some brands which make

“gluten-free” the cornerstone of their identity
and target the committed gluten-free consumer,
this message is another one which has become
very widely used in the context of the “natural”
and “free-from what’s bad” trend.
Of our 15 case studies, nine mention that they
are “free-from” one or more of gluten, wheat,
soy or another “undesirable ingredient” (see
table).
“Natural” can also mean “as few ingredients
as possible” – and only ingredients whose
description the consumer can easily understand
and which they’d expect to find in their pantry.

2. Natural = “Natural functionality”

The message that a food or food ingredient

has a natural and intrinsic health benefit is one
of the most persuasive in food marketing. For
many consumers a health benefit that is intrinsic
In most markets “natural” is becoming a basic consumer
to the product – such as oats and heart health, requirement.
blueberries and antioxidants – is the only one
they will accept without hesitation.
continued on page 20

The significance of Frito-Lay’s conversion isn’t confined to the US market. Going “natural and local” is a core element in the company’s
strategy in most markets around the world. Frito-Lay is emphasising local sourcing of potatoes and other ingredients in several markets.
Given that its snack brands have the number one market share in most countries (with its share as high as 70% in some markets, such
as Turkey) – the salty snack aisle of the supermarket is likely to be redefined as one in which “all-natural” and even “locally sourced
ingredients” is the category standard and no longer a point of difference.

16 www.new-nutrition.com
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BOX 2: NATURALNESS IS A KEY ELEMENT IN BRAND SUCCESS

Nature’s Pride and Chobani Greek Yoghurt are two of the brands that have become a top-10 success by
responding to what SymphonyIRI calls “consumers’ passion for all-natural foods”.

CHART 1: PERCENT OF FOOD & BEVERAGE NEW PRODUCT PACESETTERS OFFERING HEALTH &
WELLNESS BENEFITS VS HISTORICAL TREND
30%
Natural/Organic
16%
27%
Added Vitamins, Nutrition
19%
27%
High Fiber/Whole Grain
10%
25%
Reduced Calorie
17%
25%
Lower Fat/Fat Free
17%
12%
Energy/Protein
6% 2010
11% 1997-2010
Antioxidants
4%
10%
No Trans Fat
4%
6%
Low Salt/Sodium
1%

Source: SymphonyIRI New Product Profiler™, New Products Launched February 2009- January 2010

17 www.new-nutrition.com
 TABLE 2: LABEL MESSAGES FOR HEALTHY SNACKS IN OUR CASE STUDIES
Low/ Added
Source of Less fat/ Less/zero No preser- No artificial No artifical
Message High protein Gluten-free All-natural medium Wheat-free vitamins/ Energy No sugar Circulation
fibre/high fibre fat-free trans fats vatives flavours colours
GI minerals
Popchips X X X
Mars Cirku X X
Mars CocoaVia X
Mars Goodness X X
Knows
Probake 50 X X X X
ThinkThin Protein X X X
Bars
ThinkThin Bites X X X X
ThinkThin Crunch X X X X
Luna Protein Bar X X X X

18
Nestle Iron Girl X X
Energy Bar
Balance Bar Nimble X X X X X
Tasty Bars X
Kind Plus Bar X X X X X X
Kind Mini Bar X X X X X X
Healthy snacking

Belvita X X X
Fiber One X
Wonderful X X X

www.new-nutrition.com
Pistachios
Nairn’s X X X X X X X X

Nature Addicts X X X X
Castus X X X X X
Frito-Lay Flat Earth X
chips
Ocean Spray X
Craisins
Total no. of 9 8 7 7 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3
mentions
 TABLE 2 continued:
Less
Source of Sustained Source of cholesterol/ No added Weight- 100% fruit/ Contain
Message Complex carbs Satiety Whole grain Dairy-free Less sugar Heart health
flavanols energy antioxidants cholesterol sugar loss high in fruit vegetables
free
Popchips X
Mars Cirku X
Mars CocoaVia X
Mars Goodness X
Knows
Probake 50 X
ThinkThin Protein
Bars
ThinkThin Bites
ThinkThin Crunch X
Luna Protein Bar X X

19
Nestle Iron Girl
Energy Bar
Balance Bar Nimble
Tasty Bars X X
Kind Plus Bar X X X
Healthy snacking

Kind Mini Bar X X

Belvita X X X X
Fiber One
Wonderful X X X

www.new-nutrition.com
Pistachios
Nairn’s X X X X

Nature Addicts X X
Castus X
Frito-Lay Flat Earth X
chips
Ocean Spray X X
Craisins
Total no. of 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1
mentions
 Healthy snacking

continued from page 16

The attraction to consumers of foods whose pomegranate juice brand. The company
health benefits are an intrinsic feature and do has worked the same magic on pistachio
not result from added ingredients or special nuts as it did on pomegranates – taking an
processing is a magnetic one and it is a key factor underappreciated but healthy commodity and
in the dramatic reversal in the fortunes of oats. making it desirable. Wonderful Pistachio’s sales
Packs of Quaker Oats, for example, prominently grew 26% in the year to June 2011, to over $153
feature the “100% Natural” message. million (€107 million). The brand has driven
Case Study 10, on Nairns, shows how a half the total sales increase in the US snack nuts
traditional cracker brand which was focused on market.
oat products was able to connect to the growing With quirky marketing and a focus on
“naturally nutritious” image of oats and reinvent communicating the intrinsic health benefits of
itself as a healthy snacking brand. the nuts Wonderful Pistachios have flourished
Natural health benefits are also an idea that’s despite recession and a hefty price premium,
easy for the media to understand and easier with an 8oz (225g) bag retailing for a suggested
still for time-pressed journalists to explain. The $3.99 (€2.89) – in the neighbourhood of
media is always hungry for stories about foods cashews, macadamias and almonds rather than,
with an intrinsic health benefit – oats, almonds, say, cheaper peanuts.
cranberries and blueberries have all benefited Besides the lessons of Pom Wonderful, the
from media attention. company watched closely what almond growers
The most marked trend is for snacks marketed and brands had done with their commodity.
for their intrinsic healthfulness and perceived “They have a laser focus on getting people
naturalness, even if the snack is a processed to understand how healthy almonds are,” a
product. company spokesperson told New Nutrition Business.
Perceived health benefits from “naturally “We saw that as a model for replicating
p ga
healthy” ingredients is an easy concept for
both consumers and the media to understand.
Hence oats, almonds, cranberries, blueberries
and many other foods are seeing increasing
use in snacks and this trend can only
strengthen.
Fruit, in particular, is benefiting from
the “naturally functional” preference of
consumers. So important is the fast-developing
fruit and vegetable snacking trend that this is
addressed as a separate trend.
Chart 2 shows the top-10 brands identified
by Symphony IRI out of its “Pacesetters” for
2010. Of these, the most remarkable is the
Wonderful Pistachios brand (see Case Study 9).
If you are interested in how to communicate
“natural functionality” to consumers and
how to succeed in healthy snacking, this is the
brand to study.
The company behind the brand is
California’s Paramount Farms, the same
company which created the now iconic
and globally-recognized Pom Wonderful

20 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

BOX 3: EVEN MARS CHOOSES INGREDIENTS WITH A HEALTH HALO

Even a mass-market brand like Mars’ Marathon

Bars recognises the natural trend with its recent
introduction of Marathon Smart Stuff, billed as
“combining great taste with healthy ingredients” and
a “nutritious and delicious way to snack”.

As Mars acknowledges, “With increasing time

constraints imposed by work, school and personal life, leading an active lifestyle is not always compatible with
eating healthy.”

The new bars include “wholesome ingredients, like blueberries, cranberries and peanuts, and are made with
real chocolate for a taste everyone will love”. Each bar contains a blend of eight essential vitamins and minerals,
and is said to be an excellent source of calcium.

Containing 3 to 5 grams of fibre and 140 calories or less per serving, the new energy bar is naturally low in
sodium and provides 5 grams of whole grains, with no high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavours, colours or
sweeteners.

consistent health message over a long period of
time and getting it ingrained in people’s minds.”
Case Studies that illustrate this trend are:
Case Study 8: Pepsi “natural” repositioning
Case Study 9: Wonderful Pistachios
Case Study 10: Nairns reinventing a
traditional food with the health benefits of oats
The ‘natural’ message is a prominent message on Quaker Oats
packs.
2.2 TREND 2: FRUIT & VEGETABLES
Fruit-based products will be the most important
drivers of the wellness trend and of the healthier
diets that are now redefining the global food and
drink industry. Fruit, in many new and varied
formats, is the future of food and health.
More than any other food, fruit has a halo of
health. It’s a halo that’s being made brighter all
the time as a steady stream of news about fruit’s
benefits makes its way into a media eager for
simple and positive stories about healthy eating.
The sweetness of fruits, their taste and texture
and their portability make them much more
appealing to consumers as an all-natural way to
eat more healthily than almost any other food.
And fruit is seen by consumers as one the few
things they can eat as an indulgence without
feeling guilt. Fruit scientists and celebrity
nutritionists support a wealth of “all-natural”
health benefits for fruit, which has become a
credible carrier of health messages.
However, people know they should eat more
fresh fruit but they don’t, because fresh fruit is
just not convenient enough.
Fruit drinks have stepped into the breach
to address this widespread problem and an
increasing number are positioned as delivering
one or more of the recommended five servings
of fruit a day. Fruit drinks that carry a clear

21 www.new-nutrition.com

CHART 2: 2010 NEW PRODUCT PACESETTERS
Top 10 Food & Beverage brands year-one dollar sales ($ Mil) across food, drug and mass (excluding Walmart)
1. POWERADE ION4
Shelf Stable Sports Drinks
2. Chobani Greek Yogurt
Yogurt
3. Wonderful Pistachios
Snack Nuts/Seeds/Corn Nuts
4. glacéau vitaminwater zero
Bottled Water
5. Nature’s Pride
Fresh Bread & Rolls
6. Trop50
Rfg Juices/Drinks
7. Thomas’ Better Start
English Muffins
8. Green Mountain Coffee K-Cups
Coffee
9. Budweiser Select 55
Beer/Ale/Alcoholic Cider
10. Trident Layers
Gum
Source: SymphonyIRI New Product Profiler™, New Products Launched February 2009- January 2010
message that they deliver one or two of your
recommended five-a-day provide, as far as
consumers are concerned, all the benefits
and taste of fruit with none of the mess and
inconvenience. In other words, in drinks fruit
comes in a convenient, portable form.
Fruit snacks are increasingly favoured by
consumers over fresh fruit for simple reasons
of convenience. As Elizabeth Pivonka, former
president of the US Produce for Better Health
Foundation, which runs the 5-a-day consumer
education campaign, put it: “The overall trend in
consumption isn’t going to continue to increase
because one of the main reasons consumers
don’t eat more fruit is that they say they’re not
convenient.”
“Fresh products are not in the formats
that meet people’s lifestyle needs,” adds fruit
marketing guru Professor David Hughes,
Emeritus Professor of Food Marketing at
Imperial College London and director of berry
company BerryFarms, one of Europe’s largest
berry fruit company. “As a result, the value that
22
Healthy snacking
$190.5
$149.4
$114.1
$110.3
$80.8
$74.4
$74.2
$62.1
$59.9
$53.9
the fresh fruit industry should be capturing is
being stolen by consumer goods companies. In
what form do you think people under 35 will eat
fruit and vegetables? More than half – maybe
much more – will be in processed formats.”
The central importance of convenience to
consumers means that fruit in convenient forms
(processed) will see growth, while most fruits sold
in fresh forms will continue to see only slight
sales increases – or none at all.
What is particularly striking is how much
consumers are willing to pay for fruit when it’s
convenient, as the case studies of Nature Addicts
(Case Study 11) and Castus (Case Study 12)
illustrate.
Berries (and specifically blueberries) are the
exception to this rule, as Case Study 15 shows.
In some markets fresh berries are showing
20%-30% per annum growth in sales and have
overtaken other fruits as the single most valuable
segment of the fruit and vegetable market.
The reason is that in addition to their strong
health image berries are convenient. These small
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fruit need no peeling and are easy to eat from
the hand. If other fruits can achieve the same
level of convenience then they too might enjoy
more popularity with time-starved but health-
conscious consumers.
Traditionally, vegetables, by comparison,
have had a distinct image problem. They are
perceived as inconvenient, not at all portable,
difficult to prepare and as not tasting good.
However, the fruit drinks industry is
showing how fruit juices in combination with
vegetable juices can create an excellent flavour
combinations as well as successful brands:
Campbell’s V8 V-Fusion: Stagnant
sales of its V8 vegetable juice brand prompted
Campbell’s to launch
V8 Fusion – blends
of vegetable and fruit
juices that each contain
a full combined serving
of fruits and vegetables,
but taste only of fruit.
Introduced in 2006,
sales have passed the
$170 million (€120
million) mark. V-Fusion
has become “far and
away our growth
driver” according to
Campbell’s: “You can
get vegetables through
a product that doesn’t
taste like vegetables. That’s why V-Fusion is on
fire.”
Ocean Spray 100% Juice Fruit &
Veggie: Launched in 2010, each serving of
this innovative new product contains two full
servings of fruits and vegetables. One variety
includes grape, apple, carrot, cranberry, sweet
potato, strawberry, beetroot and banana juices.
“Consumers were looking for products that
would help them with different dimensions of
health,” the company explained. “And they are
looking for more ways to get vegetables.”
23
Healthy snacking
The idea of fruit-plus-
vegetable combinations
is now transferring
rapidly over to snacking
as Chart 3 shows. These
combinations are still
in the most embryonic
stage, but growth is rapid
and snack technology
already makes them
straightforward to produce
– the challenge lies not in
technology or formats, but
in marketing and creating
consumer acceptance.
However the success of fruit-plus-vegetable
drinks shows what is possible.
There are also opportunities with fruit and
vegetables to create products that have novelty
– or, to express it another way, “newness to the
consumer” – a concept that can have multiple
interpretations.
The forms that novelty can take include:
• New fruit: This is the most obvious type
of novelty and is in fact what most
people mean when they use the term in
connection with superfruit. This doesn’t
mean in practice that the fruit is novel,
just that it is new in the market you are
introducing it to. Cranberry, for example,
is long-established in the US, but when
it appeared in Australia and in France it
was a new and unfamiliar fruit in both of
those countries.
• New colours, tastes, aromas:
Familiar fruit can acquire the aura of
novelty if varieties are bred or marketed
which provide new and unfamiliar
characteristics. For example, consumers
expect apples to have pale flesh – but if
they were to cut into an apple and find
that the flesh was dark red all the way
through, that would clearly be novel (see
illustration on page 24).
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 Healthy snacking

• Fruit can also be a carrier for

benefits. In many countries some fruit
and vegetables have the advantage of
being associated in a natural and credible
way with the digestive health message.
Fruit such as fig, pear, prune, plum,
kiwi and rhubarb have a traditional
association with digestive health in many
countries and in Russia beetroot has that
association.

Case Studies that illustrate this trend:

Case Study 11: Nature Addicts
Case Study 12: Castus
Case Study 14: Ocean Spray Cranberries Familiar fruit with unfamiliar characteristics – such as this apple
with dark red flesh all the way through – have an aura of novelty.
Case Study 15: Blueberries

CHART 3: FRUIT & VEGETABLE SNACK PRODUCT LAUNCHES 2009-2011 (YTD)

A “new category”, it has come to life in 2011. It is an embryonic category but there has been a surge of
launches of snack products which combine fruits and vegetables.

Source: Mintel GNPD

24 www.new-nutrition.com

2.3 TREND 3: HIGHER PROTEIN,
SLOWER CARBS
Having “energy” to get through the day and
also wanting to maintain a healthy weight
are two top consumer concerns. According
to research in 32 countries by Health Focus
International – the most-respected researchers
into consumer health motivations – these two
have ranked consistently in consumers’ list of
top-five concerns over the last 10 years, across
all markets.
As the Case Studies show, weight
management is an area in which snack
companies have been very active, with
offerings ranging from controlled calorie
portions (such as 100-calorie portions)
through to bars. For example, nine of our
15 case studies communicate that they are
high in protein and fibre to provide a sense
CHART 4: CHANGE IN BODY WEIGHT DURING THE DIOGENES STUDY
As the chart shows, the high protein-low GI diet produced the best weight-loss results.
Source: Diogenes study
25
Healthy snacking
of satiety so that the consumer gets a more
satisfying snack and wants to eat less.
Still at an early stage is the concept of
“good carbs”, “slow carbs” or “low glycemic
index (GI)”. However, the trend is clear and a
stronger science base for these messages will
see their use in healthy snacks increase in the
years ahead.
2.3.1 HIGHER PROTEIN, LOWER GI GETS
FIRM FOUNDATION IN SCIENCE
Protein’s image as a valuable part of a
healthy diet got a major boost in November
2010, following the publicity surrounding
the publication in the New England Journal of
Medicine of the results of the world’s largest
diet study.
The large-scale randomised study, called
Diogenes, investigated the optimum diet
composition for preventing and treating
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obesity.
The study was conducted by eight
European research centres and headed by
Thomas Meinert Larsen, PhD, and Professor
Arne Astrup, Head of Department at the
Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE), University
of Copenhagen, and it was funded by an EU
grant of €14.5 million ($11 million).
The researchers found that high-protein,
low-glycemic index (GI) diets were the most
effective for weight management (see Chart
4). It’s a significant study, not only because
it challenges many strongly-held beliefs
(including the widely held negative view of
GI in the US) but because Professor Astrup
was previously not a fan of high protein and
low GI – but the results of good science have
made him change his view.
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Healthy snacking
The researchers favour diets with 25% of
calories from high-quality, low-fat protein
sources and comment that “current dietary
recommendations are not optimal for
preventing weight gain”.
Their recommendation is a higher intake of
(high quality) protein than current guidelines
recommend; eating this way, they say, means
you can also eat until you are full without
counting calories and without gaining weight.
Because of the quality and scale of the
study it is already having an impact on
the world of nutrition. It’s good news for
anyone making foods with a high content
of wholegrain (such as dark breads, oats,
breakfast cereals), producers of vegetables
and some (but not all) fruits as well as protein
companies.
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2.3.2 PRODUCT DESIGN TO SHIFT TO GOOD
CARBS
The quality and scale of the Diogenes study
has attracted a significant amount of media
attention and it is already having an impact
on food marketing.
Kellogg’s Special K breakfast cereal for
example, today the world’s most successful
weight management brand, now flags up on
its label in Australia – with more countries
likely to use the same message – that it “gives
you a Low GI (Glycemic Index) value of 53,
plus it is High in Protein (5.9 grams per serve)
and still 99% fat free”.
The brand’s website reinforces the message,
with a section dedicated to explaining the
Diogenes study.
Special K matters because it is both the
leading weight management brand, setting the
bar for other weight management products,
and one of the world’s biggest healthy
snacking brands. In the US, for example,
Special K is an $850 million (€616 million)
brand and its fastest-growing products are
Special K snack bars. Their sales jumped
an impressive 22% to $223 million (€161
million) in 2010, according to Symphony IRI
supermarket scanning data, which does not
include Walmart sales, driving 9% growth in
total brand sales.
Nairns, an expert brand in oat snacks (see Case Study 10),
has made the slow energy release properties of oats a key
message in its brand marketing.
27
Healthy snacking
In the light of the scientific validity of the
Diogenes study and its growing impact, more
and more product developers will be looking
at how they can ensure that their snacks
have a low-GI value. That will accelerate the
existing trend to use whole grains in product
formulation.
Whole grains – “good carbs” – and low-
GI also connect to slowly rising consumer
interest in the idea of “sustained energy”.
As explained above, “energy” is one of
consumers’ highest-ranking needs, but
this need not be the caffeine-fuelled kick
characteristic of energy drinks like Red Bull.
Many people, it seems, prefer a product
that “keeps them going” – and reduces
their desire to snack, an overlap with the
consumer interest in weight management.
Underlying this is a concept of a product that
“releases” its energy slowly – so you avoid
the blood-sugar spike that’s associated with
carbohydrates.
The “slow release” energy message is in
fact in marketing terms quite an old message
and it has been used on several products for
10-15 years. However, it’s only recently that
science has given the message more weight
and only recently that the consumer media
has discussed it more in columns by dietitians
and other health writers – and hence there
has been a revival in its usage.
Several of the brands in our Case Studies
use a “slow release energy” or “sustained
energy” message:
Nairn’s (Case Study 10), an expert
brand in oat snacks, has made the slow energy
release properties of oats a key message in its
brand marketing:
Nairn’s is naturally energising and keeps you going
throughout the day.
Kraft Belvita Breakfast Biscuits
(Case Study 6) has focused heavily on
a “slow release” message in its marketing.
Packaging carries a graphic on the front and
the side panel that is intended to convey the
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 Healthy snacking

idea of slow release of energy, with text that This has been proven in several clinical studies.
reads:
Thinking about whether and how to create
They are carefully made and gently baked so that, products that have “better carbs” will have to
as part of a balanced breakfast, the carbohydrates are be on every company’s NPD agenda.
regularly released over 4 hours to keep you going all
morning.

BOX 4: SLOW RELEASE CARBS MESSAGE FROM KRAFT

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BOX 5: SIMPLY EIGHT KEEPS IT SIMPLE FOR CONSUMERS

Breakfast and snack-food maker Simply Eight is “responding to consumers turning back to times when food
was made at home with simple pantry ingredients that we know and trust,” according to founder Ernie Pang.

It has launched a new line of cookies and chewy granola bars contain just eight or less all-natural
ingredients.

“Consumers are getting back to nature with simple, less processed packaged foods,” says Pang.

Simply Eight is starting its product line with four breakfast and snack food products: Real Chocolate Chip
Chewy Granola Bars, Real Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Chewy Granola Bars, Real Chocolate Chip Cookies,
and Real Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Each contains only eight or fewer of the following ingredients: whole wheat flour, whole oats, brown sugar,
honey, rice crisps, chocolate chips, canola oil, vanilla extract, peanut butter, vegetable shortening, baking
powder, eggs, baking powder, and salt.

Simply Eight intentionally avoided trans fats, HFCS, hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, artificial colors,
artificial preservatives or GMOs.

To align with food regulations, the company is required to use sub-ingredients in the nutrition label. However,
Simply Eight ensures those sub-ingredients are familiar and can be pronounced.

29 www.new-nutrition.com

3. Brand positioning in healthy snacking
The motivation behind writing this report
was to take everything we have learned
about healthy snacking trends and strategy
and condense it into a simple form that any
one can quickly read and apply to their own
business plan. In support of this we have
provided 15 case studies of snacking brands
so that you can see strategy in action. All the
case studies are based on interviews with the
companies themselves, and from these you get
a first-hand account of what works, and what
doesn’t work.
We hope these insights, together with the
trends and strategies sections, will enable you
to lower your risk of failure and maximize
your chances of success by:
a. Making a realistic appraisal of what your
potential market is likely to be;
b. Getting a realistic view of how long
it will take you to go from start-up to
success;
c. Getting a clear view about how best to
identify and target the right consumer
group for your product;
d. Learning something about appropriate
marketing guerilla tactics and best
practices that you can use in your own
start-up;
e. Using all this information to work out
how much capital you will need to fulfill
your ambition.
3.1 TARGETING THE RIGHT
CONSUMERS
Most companies believe that they should aim
squarely at the high-volume mass market
and that niches should have no place in their
strategy. That’s an understandable point of
view, but one of the key lessons from the
business of food and health over the last
15 years is that very few brands are able to
make a success in the mass market on day
30
Healthy snacking
one – and in fact most never make it to
the mass market, instead finding that their
business is driven by small but loyal groups
of consumers, with high repeat purchase
rates (80% as compared to the 35%-40%
that’s conventional for most successful food
and beverage brands). It’s important that you
base your strategy on understanding the key
motivations of the different consumer groups
in different areas of the market.
You may already be familiar with the
Technology Adoption Life Cycle model, first
developed in the late 1950s when it grew out
of social research to describe how consumer
groups respond to innovations and new
benefits. It divides consumers into five groups:
Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority,
Late Majority and Laggards, as defined by
their readiness to accept new technologies and
products.
The Food and Health Life-cycle Model
(Food & Health Marketing Handbook, Mellentin
and Wennstrom, 2002) is an adaptation of
this model. It divides consumers into three
main groups:
Technology consumers – motivated by
technology, this group puts functional before
food and will see the product in a medical
context.
Lifestyle consumers – first to try out new
benefits, this group will accept the concept
of functional foods and health-enhancing
foods of all types, provided that they work in
the context of their lives and support their
identity of being a front-runner.
The mass-market consumer – only
motivated by food benefits, they will wait
until functional food is clearly established in
a normal food context. The health aspect is
firmly secondary to the food (and the price).
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These consumer categories are described in
detail as follows:
3.1.1 TECHNOLOGY CONSUMERS
These are the people who have serious
problems to which they are seeking a solution.
They are willing to pay premium prices for
something that delivers the specific benefit
that they need and, once they have found a
product that works for them, they are loyal
consumers. They are an early adopter
market.
Technology consumers are a niche,
accounting for 5%-10% of the consumer
market (depending on the country) but as
populations age their numbers are growing.
US consumer research company
HealthFocus describes these technology
stakeholders as “Healers” who are strongly
“need-driven”, saying: “Need-driven shoppers
are those personally affected by a health
problem and/or have extreme concerns
about a health problem. Their attitudes and
behaviors are significantly different from other
shoppers based on their need to manage
their health condition or address their health
concern.”
continued on page 33

CHART 5: THE NUTRITIONAL PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE – HOW IT WORKS

The key to the Model is as follows:
• The vertical axis shows sales
• The horizontal axis is time
• The blue line plots the volume growth of the market over time
• The broken grey line plots the unit price curve (the price per kilo or price per litre) over time,
reflecting how price is high at the beginning of a market when there are few consumers and raw
material costs may be high and tends to decline as volume grows, scale economies develop and
competition pushes down the price.
Many products start out on the left, selling in low volumes at premium prices. Over time their appeal increases
and they move down the price curve to the right, eventually becoming mass-market products. The stages of
the life cycle are:
Technology consumers – Early adopters, people who have a near-medical need for a product. They will pay a
substantial premium for something that addresses their condition.
Lifestyle consumers – Interested in maintaining their wellness, not fighting illness. They will adopt new brands
and will pay a premium if it supports their lifestyle.
Mass-market consumers – Motivated when a benefit becomes a standard and is available in products with low
or no premiums, ideally from well-known and trusted brands.

Technology Lifestyle Mass-market Solid line = sales

Consumers Consumers Consumers volumes

Sales

Broken line = unit selling price

TIME

Source: Mellentin & Wennström, The Food & Health Marketing Handbook

31 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

CHART 6: TECHNOLOGY CONSUMERS, A KEY SEGMENT FOR HEALTH BRANDS

The Technology Consumers segment includes people who:

a) Have a serious medical issue, such as elevated blood pressure or elevated cholesterol or
irritable bowel syndrome or suffering from sarcopenia, and are looking for a food product
that is clinically proven to address these conditions so that they can include it in their dietary
regime.

b) Have an allergy, such as lactose or gluten-intolerance, and need to be able to buy products
that have no risk of activating their allergy.

c) People such as elite athletes, who need a product that is guaranteed to enable them to
perform at their best.

They account for around 5%-12% of the population in most countries (9% in the US according
to consumer researchers Health Focus) and they are motivated to pay super-premium prices for
products that are guaranteed to give them the benefits they need.

Probake 50 (Case Study 3) is an example of a science-based product which tackles specific

conditions.

Technology Lifestyle Mass-market Solid line = sales

Consumers Consumers Consumers volumes

Sales

Broken line = unit selling price

TIME
MEDICAL ----- EARLY ADOPTERS ----- EARLY MAJORITY ----- LATE MAJORITY ----- LAGGARDS
HEALERS DISCIPLES INVESTORS MANAGERS STRUGGLERS UNMOTIVATEDS

9% 9% 19% 44% 12% 6%

Health Focus consumer segmentations and percentage of consumers in each segment

Health Focus research is a respected source of insight into consumers. Its segmentation also finds an
important group of early adopters, accounting for 27% of the population, called Disciples and Investors.

Source: Mellentin & Wennström, The Food & Health Marketing Handbook

32 www.new-nutrition.com

continued from page 31
Technology consumers include, for
example:
• Someone who has had a heart attack
or has been found to have elevated
cholesterol and who is using a
cholesterol-lowering food, perhaps in
conjunction with a statin drug prescribed
by a physician.
• The medically lactose-intolerant, who
account for about 5% of the population
in most countries.
Any of us can become a technology
consumer if we develop a strong-enough
need-state. For example, if you become a
committed athlete or marathon-runner, you
will want to find sport nutrition products
that have technology that is guaranteed to
give you the maximum benefit and support
your performance. Equally, most of us may
become technology consumers in later life as
a natural result of the ageing process.
Technology consumers are “the experts”
– they will know all the details of yours and
every other competing product, they’ve read
the magazine articles and the leaflets in the
health food store, they’ve sent off for the
manufacturer’s information pack, they’ve
visited the websites and they are in possession
of all the facts.
Ideally this group will react positively to
the health benefit of your food, support the
technology and find it effective for dealing
with their problem. They will reject any
technology that doesn’t deliver the benefit in
the optimal way.
The benefit of having a strong appeal to
this group has been shown in the recession.
While some brands with “soft” health benefits
saw sales stagnate or fall, cholesterol-lowering
brands such as Benecol and Danacol saw sales
grow by as much as 20% per annum, despite
selling at super-premium prices.
For start-ups, technology consumers are an
excellent launch-pad into the market – they
are few in number, can be reached through
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Healthy snacking
very targeted marketing, they are willing to
pay a premium for your product if it actually
delivers the benefit they are looking for, and
they are very loyal – cholesterol-lowering
brands, for example, often have repeat
purchase rates of 80% and above, compared
to 30%-35% for regular grocery brands.
Targeting the technology consumers enable
you to start with a niche – a niche which
may be too small for big companies even to
consider – and then dominate it.
Because of the need for an effective,
science-based product, the technology
consumer niche is the perfect target for
companies based in science. Case Study 3 on
Probake 50 shows a science start-up that’s
explicitly making the technology consumer its
point of entry into the market.
3.1.2 LIFESTYLE CONSUMERS
Also an early adopter market, these people
have no specific medical need but they aim
to have a lifestyle of health and wellness.
This group has a strong skew towards more
affluent, better-educated, 40+ consumers.
They often have high disposable income and
they are a worthwhile market to develop.
Driven by choice rather than need, they are
willing to pay a premium for any brand that
supports their wellness lifestyle. They buy
soy milk, blueberries, pomegranate juice,
probiotic yoghurt – and in fact they are the
key driver of the business of food and health
and account for 20%-25% of the population
in most countries.
They are not afraid to experiment and take
the risk of trying out new products – they
may even be strongly motivated in terms of
their self-identity by “being first” with the new
trends. In fact of our 15 case studies, 10 are
clearly positioned towards these consumers.
It is also the case that – for a variety of
reasons including lack of scale, cost of the
effective health ingredients and others – most
of the companies in the case studies sell their
products at a premium price. The lifestyle
continued on page 35
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CHART 7: LIFESTYLE CONSUMERS, A KEY SEGMENT FOR HEALTH BRANDS

Lifestyle consumers are a key consumer group, accounting for 25%-30% of the population in most
markets. It is a low-volume, high-value segment of the market. Most health brands start out targeting
this group – a few use it as a beach-head from which to evolve into the mass market. But for many
brands it is better to stay in this segment, which has the benefit of loyal consumers with high repeat
purchase rates (80% or better) and high margins.

Also an early adopter market, these people have no specific medical need but they aim to have a lifestyle
of health and wellness. They are not afraid to experiment and take the risk of trying out new products.
This part of the market is the perfect starting point for most healthy food and beverage start-ups. Of our
15 case studies, 10 are clearly positioned towards these consumers.

Technology Lifestyle Mass-market Solid line = sales

Consumers Consumers Consumers volumes

Sales

Broken line = unit selling price

TIME
MEDICAL ----- EARLY ADOPTERS ----- EARLY MAJORITY ----- LATE MAJORITY ----- LAGGARDS
HEALERS DISCIPLES INVESTORS MANAGERS STRUGGLERS UNMOTIVATEDS

9% 9% 19% 44% 12% 6%

Health Focus consumer segmentations and percentage of consumers in each segment

Health Focus research is a respected source of insight into consumers. Its segmentation also finds an
important group of early adopters, accounting for 27% of the population, called Disciples and Investors.

Source: Mellentin & Wennström, The Food & Health Marketing Handbook

34 www.new-nutrition.com

continued from page 33
consumer, with their willingness to pay a
premium, is the perfect target consumer for
companies who have no choice but to charge
a premium.
They are a particularly powerful group,
who, like technology consumers, have high
rates of repeat purchase, and small groups of
people can have a disproportionate effect on
the success of health brands.
A good example of the power of early
adopters can be found in the success of
Danone Activia digestive health yogurt in the
US. Activia has delivered a recession-defying
performance, growing consistently to over
$412 million (€309 million) in retail sales,
but, says Danone, “It doesn’t have broad
penetration among consumers but rather
dedicated usage among a narrow slice of
consumers – sales are driven by about 5% of
consumers.”
In many parts of Europe Activia, after
more than a decade on the market, has
evolved into the mainstream, but everywhere
it began as a niche proposition.
In fact, in most categories in the
supermarket, successful health brands begin
by targeting the lifestyle consumers and create
a strong and loyal following, often using them
as a beachhead from which to eventually
expand into the mass-market.
However, you are not compelled to move
into the mass market. To go there means
to accept lower profit margins in exchange
for higher volumes. The net effect may be
that your brand generates no more actual
profit – and if you compete on price you
may find yourself making less profit than
when you were in the lifestyle segment. In
fact some lifestyle brands that have tried to
move into the mass market – using money-
off deals for example to create trial – found
that they acquired new users who turned out
to be very price-driven and had low loyalty,
and in the recession that began in 2008 this
was disastrous. One of the best examples is
European smoothie giant Innocent, a super-
premium brand that entered the mass market
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Healthy snacking
in a quest for more volume only to find that
when recession arrived its sales plunged 30%
as the price-conscious mass-market consumers
turned away.
Most health brands in most categories
choose to remain in the higher-margin
lifestyle consumer segment, where they can
focus on meeting the needs of a small group
of very loyal customers. Marketing used to be
about maximizing your penetration – but in
health low penetration matters less than high
rates of repeat purchase.
3.1.3 MASS MARKET CONSUMERS
Mass market consumers are pragmatic and
conservative. They do not want to take risks
on how they spend their hard-earned money.
Small and new entrepreneurial brands may
appeal to lifestyle consumers, but to the
mass market consumer what matters is the
appeal of brands they know and trust. Mass
market consumers are unwilling to take risks
with benefits, ingredients and brands they
haven’t heard of. They are price-sensitive.
If you go into the mass-market, you need to
be motivated more by volume than by profit
margin.
If a start-up begins by targeting the mass
market it will be in competition with all the
mass-market players, as well as retailer own-
label, with all their massive mass-marketing
muscle, fighting for the attention of price-
sensitive consumers. It will be difficult to get
the attention of the consumer – and price
may be the only way to do so, making it
difficult to generate enough margin to cover
your start-up costs.
Again and again, food and beverage
executives convince themselves that they must
– to satisfy their need for volume, to meet the
expectations of shareholders or to meet their
own preconceptions about how the market
should work – target the mass market.
This point of view is mistaken more often
than it is right. One of the key lessons of the
last 15 years is that companies who try to
continued on page 37
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CHART 8: MASS MARKET CONSUMERS

Mass market consumers are pragmatic and conservative. They do not want to take risks on how
they spend their hard-earned money. Small and new entrepreneurial brands may appeal to lifestyle
consumers, but to the mass market consumer what matters is the appeal of brands they know and trust.

Mass market consumers are unwilling to take risks with benefits, ingredients and brands they haven’t
heard of. They are price-sensitive. If you go into the mass-market, you need to be motivated more by
volume than by profit margin.

If a start-up begins by targeting the mass market it will be in competition with all the mass-market
players, as well as retailer own-label, with all their massive mass-marketing muscle, fighting for the
attention of price-sensitive consumers. It will be difficult to get the attention of the consumer – and price
may be the only way to do so, making it difficult to generate enough margin to cover your start-up costs.

The mass market was reluctant to pay high price premiums for health, even in economic good times,
and is more price-sensitive than ever now, while the cost of effective health ingredients means that it is
difficult to deliver an effective product at low prices.

Technology Lifestyle Mass-market Solid line = sales

Consumers Consumers Consumers volumes

Sales

Broken line = unit selling price

TIME
MEDICAL ----- EARLY ADOPTERS ----- EARLY MAJORITY ----- LATE MAJORITY ----- LAGGARDS
HEALERS DISCIPLES INVESTORS MANAGERS STRUGGLERS UNMOTIVATEDS

9% 9% 19% 44% 12% 6%

Health Focus consumer segmentations and percentage of consumers in each segment

Health Focus research is a respected source of insight into consumers. Its segmentation also finds an
important group of early adopters, accounting for 27% of the population, called Disciples and Investors.

Source: Mellentin & Wennström, The Food & Health Marketing Handbook

36 www.new-nutrition.com

continued from page 35
jump straight into the mass market usually
wind up with an expensive failure, or at best
a brand that performs short of expectations.
The past decade is littered with failures
(see our report Failures in Functional Foods &
Beverages for examples).
The mass market was reluctant to pay high
price premiums for health, even in economic
good times, and is more price-sensitive than
ever now, while the cost of effective health
ingredients means that it is difficult to deliver
an effective product at low prices.
In short, the past 15 years have shown that
by targeting the mass market from day one
you are almost guaranteed to fail, unless your
offer is specifically geared to the mass market,
and you are already a mass-market company,
such as Kraft Belvita, Case Study 6.
3.1.4 EARLY-ADOPTERS KEY TO SUCCESS
In summary, there are many very compelling
reasons to start with early adopters:
• If a trend is already in the mass market,
it’s not a trend, it’s a done deal, and the
sales growth and margin potential will
be limited. Hence it’s only in the early
adopter market where you will find
high-growth opportunities – the place
where future mass brands have their
beginnings.
• These are the only consumers willing
to be experimental and accept new
ingredients, new benefits, new brands
and entirely new types of products. By
definition – and by the experience of the
last 15 years – the mass consumer will
reject all of these.
• It’s where the premium prices are – it’s
the less price-sensitive, high-value, low-
volume, fast-growth part of the market.
And who wouldn’t want a business with
both high value per unit of sales and
high growth?
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Healthy snacking
3.2 DISTRIBUTION & ROUTES TO
MARKET: SMART THINKING FINDS
SMARTER WAYS TO TAKE HEALTH
TO MARKET
The challenges of how to take new products
to market in ways that enable companies
to earn better margins, to build better
relationships with consumers and give new
ideas a chance to grow – and escape the
stranglehold of supermarket chains with their
short-term thinking and limited shelf-space –
are what forward-thinking companies are now
wrestling with. If some of the ideas being
tried out come to fruition, the decades ahead
will see a transformation in the way that
healthy products go to market.
Distribution – getting your product where
the consumer can buy it – is key to the success
of all healthy food and beverage products. In
fact your ability to get and keep distribution,
to merchandise the product well, to get it on
“the right shelf ”, are often more important
determinants of whether your healthy
product succeeds or fails than branding
and advertising. But for many companies
“distribution” means the supermarket channel
– a channel whose constraints are such that
many innovations never see the light of day.
Supermarket chains’ margin targets, their
control over pricing, their desire for products
to be successful within eight weeks or they
are kicked off the shelf, the fact that retailers
aren’t willing to give more shelf space to
existing categories and that for a new product
to go on the shelf another one usually has to
come out – these are just a few of the factors
in supermarket retailing that mean that many
innovations never make it out of the ideation
stage, and many that do don’t last long in the
warzone of the supermarket.
In large part the problem is because in
many countries – perhaps most – there is an
ever-greater concentration of power among
a shrinking number of grocery retailers. It’s
a trend that’s well-advanced in most markets
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and in some has already reached its logical
conclusion – in Australia, for example, 90%
of the grocery market is controlled by just two
supermarket chains.
As a start-up company you have two
choices. You can either accept the status
quo and live with the stranglehold of the
supermarket chains – who may not give you
any space at all and if they do will be looking
for you to be as successful as a mass-market
brand in a matter of weeks – or you can think
how to get round it.
Wonderful Pistachios: cut out
the middlemen and dispatches its own
merchandisers to its major retailer customers
around the country, arriving in Toyota Priuses
emblazoned with green brand signage. Such
top-to-bottom control of its supply chain also
has enabled Wonderful Pistachios to penetrate
unlikely new outlets such as the upscale
Nordstrom’s department stores.
ThinkThin: is working to expand further
into its established sales channel – grocery,
drug and natural. ThinkThin will also put
a new focus on specialty channels, such
as gyms, spas, hotels and airlines. “We do
very well anywhere that people need quick,
portable food, so we are targeting core
areas where there is emphasis on food to go,
such as airports, coffee shops and smoothie
bars. Really, it is any place someone might
buy candy,” CEO Falsetto explained. The
company is also targeting corporations
that have a health and wellness agenda or
programme, such as hospitals and progressive
companies, like Google and Patagonia, for
their onsite cafeterias and gift shops.
You don’t need to be a global corporate
giant to think about innovative ways to reach
the consumer – in fact it can be to your
advantage not to be constrained by existing
“special partnerships” (as retailers always call
them just before demanding a massive price
cut from you) and the fear of giving offence to
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Healthy snacking
touchy supermarket buyers.
Home delivery can seem like a novel idea to
many food industry executives, but in major
metropolitan areas there’s nothing novel
about it. In New York City you can even
have breakfast delivered: Energy Kitchen is
one of tens of companies offering a healthy
breakfast, home delivered, within New York
City.
Home delivery is a business which is best
suited to major metropolitan areas with
high density populations – but these are
also the places where you find the greatest
concentration of health-conscious consumers
and people with high disposable incomes.
Such cities, sometimes referred to as “world
cities” – estimated to number around 70, their
numbers including Madrid, Barcelona, New
York, London and Singapore – are just the
tip of the iceberg of opportunity. Already 640
million people live in the world’s 300 largest
cities and the world is urbanising more every
day.
Indeed there is a very strong argument that
start-ups would do best by initially targeting
only dense, metropolitan areas filled with
these optimum health-conscious up-income
consumers.
In the US market the so-called natural
products stores are the perfect place for new
start-ups to begin. Providing an alternative
channel to mainstream supermarkets, they
serve the needs of the lifestyle consumers and
are both forgiving of the slow growth of new
brands – and willing to embrace new product
concepts.
While few countries are as lucky as the US
in having a specific retail channel that’s suited
to start-ups, most do have something similar –
or at least one supermarket chain that is more
experimetal and more-oriented to the health-
conscious and premium consumer.
In the UK market, for example, that retailer
is the Waitrose chain, a 250-store national
chain, which targets only high income areas.
With a 5% market share it focuses on quality
(and its sales grew despite the recession
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thanks to its credentials in health and quality
products).
Being stocked by a supermarket is not
the end of the distribution rainbow – to be
stocked in the wrong place can also produce
failure. Where a brand is merchandised in the
supermarket may be even more important
to its success or failure. Hence the Popchips
brand (Case Study 1) takes pains to be
included in the natural-foods aisle rather than
the conventional salty-snacks aisle, founder
Keith Belling said. “As they’ve developed
these natural sets better in some chains, that’s
where we’re interested in going.”
Placement and merchandising decisions
are especially crucial for Popchips because
Belling continues to eschew national
advertising campaigns that might elevate
consumer awareness of Popchips in a major
way.
3.3 MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
3.3.1 PUBLIC RELATIONS
In terms of cost-effectiveness, PR is one
of the most favoured tools for start-up
companies. Among the brands in this report
which use PR extensively are:
• Wonderful Pistachios
• Belvita
• Nature Addicts
3.3.2 SAMPLING
There’s a well established saying in marketing
that “advertising creates awareness, but
sampling creates purchase” and in our
15 years experience of the healthy foods
and beverages market one of the strongest
messages that comes from companies is that if
a product tastes good, once people have tasted
it then sales increase – with some companies
asserting that sampling is the most effective
way of driving sales increase.
One of the reasons for sampling is to take
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Healthy snacking
away people’s reservations about spending
their hard-earned money in a new product
from an unknown company in case they don’t
like the taste.
Sampling is central to Popchips, with
its unusual snack product. The company
targets dozens of venues a year, from
local races to international events such
as the Sundance Film Festival each year.
Popchips also produces a colourful booklet
that it calls “Principles of Pop”, and calls
its sampling staff “poptimists”. Overall, the
company is putting additional promotional
resources and energy behind marketing and
sampling pushes in key urban markets this
year including Boston, Chicago and Miami.
Other brands which make heavy use of
sampling are:
• Belvita
• Nature Addicts
3.3.3 SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media with its low cost compared to
traditional advertising is seen as a perfect
tool for small start-up companies. However,
although it doesn’t require much money,
it does require just as much dedication of
human resources as traditional media and
perhaps more dedication of time and effiort.
Despite a great deal of hype, there is limited
evidence that it makes a big difference to the
sales of start-up brands, other than those
which invest very, very heavily in it. One of
the best examples is Popchips. It is not a
cash-starved business but a well-funded one
able to put the sort of funds into social media
that might once have gone into traditional
advertising. “We really want to find ways to
connect with consumers and engage them
in a conversation around Popchips,” said
founder Keith Belling. “And then we want
those conversations to excite them to talk with
their friends.”
For example, in June 2010, Popchips
announced that it had named American
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celebrity and actor Ashton Kutcher as its
“President of Pop Culture”. In doing so,
Belling reached for someone whose influence
in brand-building has stretched far beyond his
relatively modest credentials as a Hollywood
actor. Kutcher, in fact, has achieved a status
in the social-media sphere far disproportional
to his success as an actor. He has more than
five million followers on his Twitter account
and more than three million Facebook fans.
He also founded a social-media startup called
Catalyst. In recognition of all of this, Time
magazine this year named Kutcher as one
In 2011 Diane Mizota, an actress who starred in Austen Powers, succeeds Ashton Kutcher as President of Pop Culture for Popchips,
following an election on Facebook.
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Healthy snacking
of its “100 Most Influential People in the
World”.
“We are excited to let [Kutcher] loose
with a bag of Popchips and full access to our
social media,” Belling said. Belling believes in
access for Popchips customers to the extent
that he personally answers all of the e-mail
messages that come into the brand, although
consumers don’t know it’s him because the
e-mail address begins “Snackers.” Belling said
that staying in touch with customers in that
way teaches him a lot about how the brand is
being perceived.
www.new-nutrition.com

4. Seven strategies to increase your chances of
success in healthy snacking
Fifteen years of analysis by New Nutrition Business
of the successes and the significant failures has
led us to draw up a list of seven “golden rules”.
Our golden rules aren’t a set of rigid must-dos,
rather they are designed as a helpful check-list,
and they are based on our observation that the
most successful brands are those which – in
addition to meeting the basic requirements of
good taste and convenience – score best on the
following criteria:
1. Be an expert brand
2. Focus on a relevant benefit, a credible
brand
3. Offer the power of a benefit the consumer
can feel
4. Remember that an ingredient is not a
point of difference
5. Begin by focusing on niches of loyal
consumers and command a premium
price
6. Differentiate your product through
packaging design
7. Open new categories and segments –
don’t be a me-too
RULE 1: BE AN EXPERT BRAND
The past 15 years of functional foods have
shown very clearly that the best way to get
consumers’ loyalty and generate repeat
business is to be “the expert brand”, the brand
that’s perceived by the consumer as the most
credible source of the health benefit that they
are looking for.
Marketing is not a battle of products; it’s a
battle of perceptions. This means that once a
brand has captured and reinforced its position
in consumers’ minds, then it’s very difficult to
change those minds.
The most successful functional brands are
the ones that find a clear expert position and
stick to it. Red Bull, for example, “gives you
41
Healthy snacking
wings”; Kellogg’s Special K helps you “drop a
jeans size”.
These brands remain strong in their markets
because they are dominant in consumers’
minds – a status achieved with a simple,
uncompromising and consistent positioning,
supported by marketing and consumer
education.
OTHER EXPERT BRANDS COVERED IN THIS
REPORT INCLUDE:
• Case Study 6: Belvita: expert brand at
breakfast
• Case Study 9: Wonderful Pistachios,
the expert in pistachios
• Case Study 4: Luna Bar, the expert
brand for women
• Case Study 10: Nairns, the expert
brand in oat-based snacks
RULE 2: FOCUS ON A RELEVANT BENEFIT, A
CREDIBLE BRAND
Failure to see a product and its benefits through
the eyes of the target consumer is one of the
most common causes of brand failure.
The benefit needs to be relevant to the
target consumers, easy to understand and
well communicated. With the thousands of
messages people get every day from advertising
and labels in the supermarket, the more
question-marks your product raises, the more
people have to think about what your product
is offering, the longer it takes them to decide to
purchase it and so it becomes easier for them
to stick with something they know rather than
trying to understand something new. You are,
after all, not selling your product in a library
but in a war zone – the supermarket.
Your product and your brand must both be
credible carriers of the benefit that is being
offered and there must be a logic to the whole
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that the consumer can accept. The idea
of chicken fortified with fibre or omega-3
will seem illogical to most readers, but these
concepts have both been tried in real life (with
results you can imagine). Dairy fortified with
marine omega-3 is almost as illogical – what,
the consumer rightly asks, is fish oil doing in
yoghurt? That, they will decide, is not natural.
And so they have, which is why most omega-3
fortified dairy products have failed or languish
in extreme niches. Omega-3 oil from fish
product, on the other hand, is logical and
credible – and gets better sales results.
The importance of having a relevant benefit
in a credible brand posed important challenges
for several of the brands in our Case Studies:
MATCHING-BENEFIT-WITH-BRAND CASE
STUDIES INCLUDE:
• Case Study 3: Probake 50 – matching
the benefit to the consumer’ preferred
consumption occasion
• Case Study 5: ThinkThin – a healthy
weight for women
• Case Study 13: Frito-Lay
RULE 3: AIM FOR A BENEFIT THE CONSUMER
CAN FEEL
One of the biggest marketing advantages a
product can have – and the surest way to create
loyalty for a brand – is to deliver a benefit that
the consumer can quickly see or feel.
Having a benefit that consumers can feel is
already the underpinning of many successful
brands and it will become even more important
in an economic environment in which people
are becoming more careful about how they
spend their money.
When people can feel the benefit that is
being offered to them, they can see that
they are getting value-for-money. If they can
quickly feel the benefit they can immediately
understand why they should buy the product
again – and again and again.
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Healthy snacking
The best examples of the power of “feel
the benefit” include the energy drink market
and the market for products for digestive
health, which are the two largest segments of
the functional food and beverage markets in
Europe and the US:
• Energy drinks deliver a health benefit
– an energy shot – that is immediately
effective and detectable. If the 24-year-
olds who want to party all night long can
feel that benefit they become – as they
have done for Red Bull and other energy
brands – loyal consumers.
• Products for digestive health have the
same advantage. With digestive health
you can very quickly find out if a product
is effective or not and if it gives you the
benefit of better digestive health.
Thus far this strategy hasn’t been widely
used in snacking but one of the few exceptions
is Case Study 7, Fiber One.
RULE 4: AN INGREDIENT IS NOT A POINT OF
DIFFERENCE
It’s very easy to get carried away at the
product development stage with the potential
of differentiating your product with a new
ingredient, but consumers do not buy products
because of their ingredients (unless they are
consumers for natural or organic products
or “gluten-free” or some other free-from
proposition).
Consumers buy products for benefits that
are relevant to them (see Rule 2). Just because
consumer awareness of an ingredient is high,
that doesn’t mean that awareness will translate
into sales.
Omega-3, for example, is claimed to have
50% or 60% consumer awareness in many
countries, but in reality people will only buy
a product if the benefit – either adult heart
health or brain development for children – is
relevant to them.
www.new-nutrition.com

Even if a brand gets every other aspect
of its design right, using an ingredient that’s
unfamiliar to consumers can be a killer concern.
Even innovative Swiss dairy group Emmi –
a company notable for its many functional
food successes – decided to withdraw from
the market its LactoTab brand, Europe’s first
chilled dairy beverage based on the ingredient
Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), citing consumer
unfamiliarity with the ingredient as one of the
main reasons for the product’s failure.
You can invest as much as you like in
technology and scientific substantiation,
explains brand strategist Peter Wennström, “but
if the consumer doesn’t accept your ingredient
and doesn’t believe that it is necessary for their
lifestyle then your technology is of no use.
You must be willing to spend time to educate
them about it – or use another ingredient that
they do accept”. It’s on such a simple rule
of consumer logic that the future of many
functional foods and beverages depends. As
Case Study 2 about Mars’ efforts to bring
cocoa into snacking shows, a new ingredient
with strong health benefits is not by itself
enough to make a success and hence Mars is
also innovating with formats and consumer
targeting.
BRANDS THAT ARE STARTING IN NICHES
INCLUDE:
• Case Study 1: Popchips
• Case Study 2: Mars
• Case Study 3: Probake 50
• Case Study 4: Women’s bars
• Case Study 5: ThinkThin
• Case Study 9: Wonderful Pistachios
• Case Study 10: Nairns
• Case Study 11: Nature Addicts
• Case Study 12: Castus
• Case Study 15: Blueberries
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Healthy snacking
RULE 5: A FUTURE OF NICHES – TO CREATE
MASS MARKET SUCCESS, FIRST START WITH
A NICHE
Again and again, food and beverage executives
convince themselves that they must – to satisfy
their need for volume, to meet the expectations
of senior management or shareholders or to
meet their own preconceptions about how the
market should work – target the mass market.
This point of view is mistaken more often
than it is right. One of the key lessons of the
last 15 years is that companies who try to
jump straight into the mass market usually
wind up with an expensive failure, or at best
a brand that performs short of expectations.
The past decade is littered with failures (see
our report Failures in Functional Foods & Beverages
for examples).
The mass market is always reluctant to
pay high price premiums for health, even
in economic good times, and is more price-
sensitive than ever now, while the cost of
effective health ingredients means that it is
difficult to deliver an effective product at low
prices.
Better than aiming a less-than-precise
“wellness” message at the mass market, look
instead for people for whom health is part of
their lifestyle. These people are, at best, only
20%-25% of the population in most countries
and tend to be older, 40 or 50-plus – the age
when people start to notice the changes that
life brings to how they look or feel and also the
age when people have not only the motivation
but sufficient disposable income to spend on
maintaining their health.
Health-conscious niches are the key driver
of health brands – in almost every case in
every country.
The following case studies are brands that
are firmly targeting niches and some are using
these as a foundation to grow towards the
mass-market.
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 Healthy snacking

RULE 6: DIFFERENTIATE USING PACKAGING for a health brand that wants to earn a premium
DESIGN price. The successful premium brands almost
all sell as single-serve products.
Good packaging, particularly innovative All the case studies cover brands that are
packaging, is crucial to creating successful single-serve products. Case studies 4 and 5
health propositions in increasingly over- show brands that have thought carefully about
crowded markets. At its best, packaging how to optimise their packaging to appeal to
supports the brand in asserting its difference women.
from the competition. It’s the best way to catch
the consumer’s eye and earn premium prices RULE 7: OPEN NEW CATEGORIES AND
and better-than-average profit margins. SEGMENTS – DON’T BE A ME-TOO
Innovative packaging performs several
Whether your company is large or small, it
important functions:
faces the challenge of how to use nutritional
benefits to carve out a space in what is almost
• It signals to consumers that “this is
always a well-served and usually fiercely-
something very different”.
guarded category.
An article in the Harvard Business Review
• It conceals a price premium – it is a
of May 1, 2007, titled “Strategies to Crack
good way of achieving high margins
Well-Guarded Markets”, provides some useful
since consumers have no similar existing
insights for food and beverage companies faced
products to function as a comparison.
with this challenge.
Using packaging, companies can create
Red Bull, the authors point out, entered the
new price points and achieve much
US with a niche product, in innovative and
higher selling prices for their products. In
entirely new packaging, priced at twice the
particular selling in single-serve packages
price of any regular soft drink and distributed
makes it very difficult for consumers to
(at first) only through bars and convenience
easily compare prices. Putting your new
stores. The company did not use advertising
product in a standard 1-litre gable-top
blitzes, instead relying on sampling. The reward
carton, on the other hand, makes your
for this unconventional approach was that Red
product look like every other brand on
Bull was able to create a loyal following and a
the shelf and enables consumers to easily
bridgehead from which to build a brand with
compare prices between your product and
over $700 million (€520 million) in US retail
regular products.
sales – a 65% market share of the energy drink
category.
• If you use packaging innovation to create
It’s an unfortunate fact that very often brands
a new category then you are defining
do not bring anything new to their category
the direction in which many of your
except the brand’s health benefit. And worse,
competitors must go and you are defining
in most cases the health benefit wasn’t truly
the packaging format they must adopt. You
a point of difference and could be already
are in effect establishing your credentials
obtained just as easily, and sometimes more
as a market leader and innovator.
cheaply, from other foods or from dietary
supplements. They are “me-too” products.
In the era of “Individualised Nutrition” single-
serve packages have more appeal to the many
New category creation
niches of consumers than family packages.
Though health matters, convenience matters
Creating a new category based around an
more, and delivering convenience is essential
innovative product is very rare in the food

44 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

industry but it is one of the most successful and it creates a totally new proposition and then
well-proven strategies in the global market for educates consumers about it. As a result,
functional foods. new demand arises among consumers for
New category creation depends on the something they didn’t know they needed. This
development of a new type of food or drink has been the basis for some of the world’s most
and a new type of consumption occasion. successful brands.
The new product and the new consumption
occasion should contribute to the identification IN THIS REPORT THE FOLLOWING CASE
and fostering of a new type of consumer need STUDIES LOOK AT BRANDS WHICH HAVE
– one that has not been properly addressed CREATED – OR ATTEMPTED TO CREATE –
NEW CATEGORIES:
before.
Marketers lean heavily on consumer research
Case Study 6: Belvita
to tell them what consumers want and then try Case Study 2: Mars Goodness Knows
to match brands to those wants. But market Case Study 3: Probake 50
research only tells you what people already Case Study 7: Fiber One
know – it won’t tell you what consumers Case Study 9: Wonderful Pistachios
don’t yet know they want. New category Case Study 10: Nairns
creation does something quite different from Case Study 11: Nature Addicts
this consumer research-dominated thinking:

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5. Case studies
Innovation in format
Case study 1: Pop Chips – new product format delivers healthier chip at premium price

Innovation in ingredients
Case study 2: Mars – exploring how to make cocoa the next ingredient success in snacks

Targeting the technology consumer

Case study 3: Probake 50 – new format brings a healthy dose of protein

Targeting the lifestyle consumer

Case study 4: Smaller, leaner, kinder: bars tap into women’s needs
Case study 5: ThinkThin Bars’ wellness platform resonates with women

Targeting the mass market

Case study 6: Kraft Belvita Breakfast – giving people permission to have a sweet snack at
breakfast
Case study 7: Fiber One – an expert brand in digestive health

“Naturalness” – the biggest trend

Case study 8: PepsiCo transforms the snack food aisle into the natural food aisle
Case study 9: Wonderful Pistachios – making natural into a super-premium success
Case study 10: Nairns – product innovation, “natural energy” from expert brand in oat-based
snacks

Fruit & vegetables

Case study 11: Nature Addicts – Europe’s most successful new snack brand
Case study 12: Castus fruit snacks – a hit with Danish children
Case study 13: Frito-Lay’s fruit and vegetable snack brand ambitions fall to earth
Case study 14: Ocean Spray – from bog fruit to big fruit
Case study 15: Berries – convenience, indulgence and “natural functionality” drive a super-
premium success story

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 Healthy snacking

Case Study 1:

Innovation in
format

47 www.new-nutrition.com

Case Study 1: Pop Chips – new product format
delivers healthier chip at a premium price
Keith Belling is a better-for-you entrepreneur
with an ambitious goal for his company,
Popchips: to become “the Vitaminwater of
the snack aisle,” said the 52-year-old CEO of
the San Francisco-based natural-chip startup.
Popchips’ proposition is simple. Using heat
and pressure to “pop” potato chips instead
of baking or frying them cuts calories, boosts
taste and allows Popchips to cram more chips
into a given volume than if they’re fried.
Charging a premium price that typically
is $1.29 (€0.99) for a single-serving bag, the
company achieved $40 million (€31 million)
in sales in 2010, Belling said, after revenues
of $19 million (€14.6 million) last year – and
more than triple Popchips’ revenues in 2008,
its first full year in operation.
“We want to do in the snack aisle what
Vitaminwater did in the beverage aisle,”
Belling told New Nutrition Business. “I’d be
thrilled with $1 billion in revenues.” But
mindful of Vitaminwater’s recent woes,
since its acquisition by Coca-Cola, Belling
noted that he didn’t want Popchips to follow
Vitaminwater’s arc completely.
And that underscores perhaps the biggest
problem for Popchips as it remains in the
throes of an initial spurt of growth: the
healthy-chip category has created its share of
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Healthy snacking
casualties, even among huge companies that
should know what they’re doing.
Part of the problem clearly is the premium
prices they demand during an extended and
perhaps transformative time of consumer
concerns about food prices; but also, they may
simply have overestimated the market for non-
fried, non-traditional salty snacks.
Stunning exhibit No. 1 is Flat Earth, the
Frito-Lay brand of healthy vegetable chips,
whose sales cratered to only about $5 million
(€3.85 million) for the 52 weeks ended June
13 since a strong introductory year of 2007,
when sales peaked at $26 million (€20 million)
in US supermarkets, drug stores and mass
merchants measured by Symphony/IRI (a
Chicago-based tracker of sales data previously
known as Information Resources Inc), not
including Walmart stores.
Likewise, sales of Terra Chips, a 20-year-
old maker of vegetable chips now owned by
Hain-Celestial, have lost momentum over the
years. Sales of the main Terra product line
grew only 5% for the 52 weeks ended June
13, to about $18 million (€13.85 million),
according to Symphony/IRI.
Belling is a serial entrepreneur who hopes
that Popchips will become his signature
company creation. As a kid, he and his
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brother would refurbish garage-sale findings
and sell them for a profit at flea markets. The
former lawyer, restaurant owner and coffee-
store executive launched a small-business
online portal called Allbusiness.com in the
late Nineties, selling it to NBC Interactive for
$250 million (€193 million) in 2000 – right
before the dot-com bubble burst.
After that sale, Belling took a year off to
travel and relish his well-timed exit from
Allbusiness.com. While in Chile fly-fishing, he
heard about an opportunity that lured him
back into business a few months earlier than
he had planned. A friend brought him into
then-troubled Restoration Hardware to help
raise money and to try to turn the company
around.
By 2005, however, Belling was scratching
his entrepreneurial itch again, sniffing around
for opportunities in the healthy-food market.
Influencing him during that time, Belling
maintained, was his personal status as “a
passionate snacker” in search of better-for-you
opportunities to indulge his own habit. Then
Belling and eventual Popchips co-founder
Patrick Turpin found a manufacturing firm
that made rice cakes and other snacks.
Soon, the duo discovered that, with the
right amount of heat and pressure, they
could pop other types of starchy food – such
as potatoes. “It took a lot of research and a
lot of snacking to get to that point,” Belling
said. “But when we did, it was truly an ‘a-ha!’
moment.”
CRACKING THE TASTE CHALLENGE
Key to the pair’s epiphany, Belling said, was
the recognition that popping would help a
healthy maker of savoury snacks overcome
the single biggest obstacle to the success that
most brands and products have had in the
segment: tastelessness.
“Before, there just wasn’t an option that
delivered on nutrition and actually tasted
good,” Belling said. “And it’s all about taste.
Yet it’s a category where consumers are
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Healthy snacking
constantly looking for innovation.”
Popchips – which do include some oil – still
have less than half the fat of fried chips and
even baked chips. Per serving, for instance,
Popchips provides 4g of fat compared with
10g per serving of Lay’s Potato Chips, 7g in
Terra Sea Salt potato chips, and even 6g of
fat per serving of Frito-Lay’s baked Sunchips
Original flavour.
Similarly, Popchips carries just 120 calories
per serving versus 150 calories for Lay’s, and
140 calories each per serving for Terra Sea
Salt and Sunchips Original.
An important benefit of Popchips’
preparation method is that they are light
compared to their main competitors: 20 or
more chips in a 1oz. serving of Popchips
compared with 15 in a traditional bag of
potato chips. That is largely because of the
difference in oil content, Belling said.
Popchips have a chewy-crispy consistency
of a hybrid of a rice cake and a potato chip.
They come in six flavours, each of them a
classic of the savoury snack aisle in American
grocery stores: Original, Barbeque, Salt &
Pepper, Sea Salt & Vinegar, Sour Cream &
Onion, and Cheddar.
MARKETING MIX OF CONVENTIONAL
AND NEW APPROACHES
In distribution, too, Belling has forged a
strategy that combines natural-foods and
traditional outlets. So, major retailers include
Whole Foods but also Kroger and Safeway
conventional supermarket chains and club-
store giant Costco, mass merchandiser Target
and drug-store chain Duane Reade. Popchips
also is merchandised and sold in Jamba Juice
stores, as the better-for-you foodservice chain
expands its menu lately.
“We keep our head down and have
developed a nice footprint at a natural pace
this way,” Belling said. “The challenge is to be
intriguing and innovative so we stand out in a
crowded snack aisle.”
That’s why, in regular supermarkets,
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 Healthy snacking

Popchips takes pains to be included in the
natural-foods set rather than the conventional
salty-snacks aisle, Belling said. “As they’ve
developed these natural sets better in some
chains, that’s where we’re interested in going,”
Belling said.
Placement and merchandising decisions
are especially crucial for Popchips because
Belling continues to eschew national
advertising campaigns that might elevate
consumer awareness of Popchips in a major
way. Belling does like clever tag lines, such as,
“Love. Without the handles.”
With that strategy – and the uniqueness
of the product – sampling also becomes
important, and Popchips targets dozens of
venues a year, from local races to international
events such as the Sundance Film Festival
each year. Popchips also produces a colourful
booklet that it calls “Principles of Pop”, and
calls its sampling staff “poptimists”.
Overall, the company is putting additional
promotional resources and energy behind
marketing and sampling pushes in key urban
markets this year including Boston, Chicago
and Miami.
EMBRACING SOCIAL MEDIA
Not surprisingly, Popchips also has embraced
online social media as a major marketing
vehicle. “We really want to find ways to
connect with consumers and engage them in
a conversation around Popchips,” Belling said.
“And then we want those conversations to
excite them to talk with their friends.”
For example, in June last year, Popchips
announced that it had named American
celebrity and actor Ashton Kutcher as its
“President of Pop Culture” (this year’s
president is Austin Powers actress Diane
Mizota, who was elected through a Facebook
campaign). In doing so, Belling reached for
someone whose influence in brand-building
has stretched far beyond his relatively modest
credentials as a Hollywood actor.
Kutcher, in fact, has achieved a status in
the social-media sphere far disproportional
to his success as an actor. He has more than
five million followers on his Twitter account
and more than three million Facebook fans.
He also founded a social-media startup called
Catalyst. In recognition of all of this, Time
magazine this year named Kutcher as one
of its “100 Most Influential People in the
World”.
“We are excited to let [Kutcher] loose with
a bag of Popchips and full access to our social
media,” Belling said at the time.
Belling believes in access for Popchips
customers to the extent that he personally
answers all of the e-mail messages that come

TABLE 3: POPCHIPS – A COMPARISON

kettle brand
popchips™ lay’s classic terra kettles stacy’s chips sunchips
chips lightly
original potato chips sea salt simply naked original
salted

chips per serving 23 15 13 15 14 16

calories per serving 120 150 150 140 130 140

total fat per serving

4 10 9 7 7.5 6
(grams)
calories from fat per
35 90 80 60 45 50
serving
saturated fat per
0 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.5 1.0
serving (grams)

* Datamonitor (Foodnavigator.com, February 6, 2008)

** 1 ounce serving comparison
***sour cream & onion and cheddar popchips have 0.5g of saturated fat.

Source: Popchips

50 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

into the brand, although consumers don’t
know it’s him because the e-mail address
begins “Snackers.” Belling said that staying in
touch with customers in that way teaches him
a lot about how the brand is being perceived.
Popchips isn’t quite Vitaminwater,
yet. Among the things that Glaceau’s
Vitaminwater brand does is use “crowd
sourcing” in its social-media marketing; for
example, enlisting online fans to help create
new flavours. “Down the road,” Belling said,
“we might do that too.”

Popchips marketing is all about fun and pleasure as well as health. The snackers’ credo is a list of “truths we hold to be self-evident”.
You can see the credo for yourself at: http://www.popchips.com/snackers-credo/

51 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

Case Study 2:

Innovation in
ingredients

52 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking
Case study 2: Mars – exploring how to make
cocoa the next ingredient success in snacks
Mars’ quest to find a way to translate its
command of cocoa-flavanol technology into
product forms that will find sweet spots with
the consumer continues, with the now year-
long test-marketing of a new snack product,
called GoodnessKnows.
GoodnessKnows is a line of “snack
squares” that are a hybrid of chocolate
confection, nutrition bar and granola square.
They include whole almonds, fruits, whole
grains and what Mars calls “deep” chocolate
– and 200mg of Mars’ patented cocoa
flavanols in each four-square serving. They
retail for a suggested price of $1.59 (€1.15)
per 36g four-square single serving and $5.39
(€3.92) per five-serving multi-pack carton.
So far, Mars has only test-marketed
GoodnessKnows in the adjacent cities of
Denver and Boulder, in Colorado, at the foot
of the Rocky Mountains. The area has been a
hot-bed of healthy food innovation since the
1970s: for example, it’s where America’s soy
milk industry was born and where Wild Oats,
the natural foods supermarket chain which
is now part of Whole Earth, opened its first
store. The local consumer market has a strong
53
representation of educated, upper income
people willing to experiment with new brands
and new foods that promise “wellness”.
As Mars said back in 2010 at the launch:
“This area is world-famous for its emphasis
on — and appreciation of — healthy living.
If we can get a stamp of approval from
Colorado’s discerning, health-conscious
consumers, then consumers everywhere
should embrace this new snack!”
MARS TESTS SNACK SQUARE AS
VEHICLE FOR “DEEP CHOCOLATE”
The idea behind GoodnessKnows seems to
be a recognition that American consumers
are willing to look at cocoa flavanols as a
healthful substance – largely because of the
better-for-you image that the media has given
to dark chocolate in recent years – but that
they have yet to find the best delivery vehicle
for those phytonutrients.
The debut of GoodnessKnows in the test
market followed the demise of the original
forms of CocoaVia: a chocolate bar, and a
candy chew. One lesson Mars has learned
from the CocoaVia experience is that
consumers weren’t willing to participate in a
regimen whose nutritional benefits required
consumption of two chocolate bars a day.
GoodnessKnows would seem to lend itself
much better to everyday consumption, though
Mars’ marketing and online content about the
product line doesn’t explicitly call for that.
The inclusion of fruits, nuts and grains
makes for a snack that naturally would seem
more wholesome and nutritious than a
chocolate bar to most consumers.
GoodnessKnows comes in three flavours:
Very Cranberry; Almonds & Berries; and
Roasted Nuts & Grains. Each four-square
serving provides 150 calories, two to three
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 Healthy snacking

grams of fibre, 3g of protein, and 20-35mg of SWITCH FROM BAR TO

sodium, in addition to the 200mg of flavanols.
For Mars, its moves with CocoaVia and its
SUPPLEMENT
testing of GoodnessKnows help make it clear
Mars also is trying to revive its CocoaVia brand,
that the driving force behind these products
this time as a dietary supplement in the form of
is the company’s desire to get retailers and
a powder to add to water, after withdrawing the
consumers alike to appreciate the unique
original CocoaVia dark chocolate nutrition bar
potency of cocoa flavanols, first of all, and of
line nearly two years ago.
the particular flavanols Mars produces using
“We leveraged the technology of what we do
its Cocoapro process.
well, the development of the [flavanol] extract,
“While flavanols can be found in some
and are giving it to consumers in a new form,”
commonly consumed foods and beverages,
Catherine Kwik-Uribe, Mars’ global cocoa-
there is a unique mixture of flavanols in
flavanol research manager, told New Nutrition
cocoa, the exact combination of which can
Business.
be found in no other foods in nature,” says
Mars has switched the positioning of these
Mars’ product literature. “While phrases such
new products from a promise of “heart health”
as ‘dark chocolate’ or ‘70 percent cacao’ are
for the original CocoaVia products to a new
used to describe the type of chocolate in a
emphasis on “circulatory” benefits. The Cocoa
product, they cannot tell someone how many
Via website (www.cocoavia.com) states:
cocoa flavanols are in a product.
Healthy circulation plays a role in: heart health, exercise
“Our deep chocolate uses cocoa beans
endurance, cognition, alertness and eye health.
specially selected and handled to retain
The addition of a fruit-flavoured form of
flavanols.
flavanol delivery, the change in the CocoaVia
“While there are many products on the
product form from chocolate bars and chews
market that are made with chocolate or
to powder packets, and the new functional
natural cocoa, few of these products can
emphasis are only three of Mars’ significant
guarantee the level of bio-active cocoa
alterations.
flavanols found in GoodnessKnows.”
The company also decided to drop cholesterol-
lowering sterols out of the product line. And
CocoaVia now is available only online, a return
to the brand’s origins after Mars attempted
to gain traction for the original products with
distribution in mainstream retail outlets.
“The market changed and consumers
evolved,” explained Fiona Posell, acting head
of sales and marketing for CocoaVia, which
is managed by the Mars Botanical division of
Mars. “To deliver the benefits of flavanols on a
daily basis, we had to look beyond what we were
doing.”
Mars has spent more than 20 years intensely
researching the properties of flavanols in
cocoa – “the characterization and chemistry
of flavanols as well as what they do within the
body,” as Kwik-Uribe put it. Mars came up with
the original CocoaVia chocolate-based products

54
www.new-nutrition.com

under a patented and proprietary system for
processing that allowed the heart-healthy
flavanols to “remain active” in foods.
STRONG START TO SALES LOSES
MOMENTUM
The CocoaVia brand was launched with much
fanfare eight years ago. After initial internet
sales beginning two years earlier, in 2005
Mars tested four flavours of dark-chocolate
CocoaVia bars and two flavours of individually
wrapped CocoaVia chews. Each 23g bar
contained 100mg of cocoa flavanols and 1.5g
of plant sterols in a formula squarely targeted at
cholesterol reduction.
Mars encouraged retailers to merchandise
CocoaVia with “healthy snacking” products such
as nutrition bars and granola bars. CocoaVia
retailed at a suggested price of about $1 (€0.73)
a bar, not far out of line with the typical price of
many candy bars and nutrition bars.
Initial sales results were so encouraging that
Mars expanded distribution of CocoaVia
In a change of strategy CocoaVia dietary supplements will only be available online
55
Healthy snacking
nationwide in 2006. Sales for 2007 came in
at a total of about $11 million (€8 million)
in US supermarkets, drug stores and mass
merchandisers tracked by SymphonyIRI, the
Chicago-based market-research firm, which
doesn’t track sales in Walmarts.
CocoaVia played to Americans’ growing
consumption of dark chocolate in general. Not
only has dark chocolate become a significant
alternative to Americans’ traditional favourite,
milk chocolate, but more and more mainstream
confectionary brands are offering choices in
dark chocolate. Some consumers understand
in particular that cocoa flavanols are healthy,
while many more Americans simply have picked
up on the vague notion that dark chocolate is
“better for you” than milk chocolate and so have
switched their candy purchases in favour of dark
chocolate.
US sales of dark chocolate peaked in 2007 at
$829 million (€605 million), a 35% jump from
the previous year, according to the National
Confectioners Association. Then recession hit,
and the pace of dark chocolate sales growth
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 Healthy snacking

slowed to a still impressive 12% in 2008. each day.

After more deceleration in early 2009, by the
end of the year, momentum had returned to
dark chocolate sales, and they finished the year
with an overall 9% gain. No data are available
yet for the 2010 sales trend.
Yet Mars was unable to establish CocoaVia as
an attractive, differentiated brand. By 2008, sales
of CocoaVia had plunged by 35% from the year
before, and then just kept declining until Mars
finally pulled the plug in mid-2009.
Mars executives said that American consumers
decided they didn’t want to think of chocolate
as a daily medicinal or supplement – and getting
the heart-health benefit from CocoaVia required
consumers to eat at least two serves of CocoaVia
“Consumers will always love chocolate but
they know that chocolate is a treat, an occasional
indulgence,” Posell said. “While it can be
enjoyed in moderation as part of a healthy
diet, chocolate is certainly not a superfood or
superfruit recommended for daily consumption
for its flavanol content.” And, she said, “Most
chocolate, even dark chocolate with a high
percent of cacao, is not a consistent source of
cocoa flavanols.”
Added Kwik-Uribe: “[Consumers] were
telling us that chocolate is a great occasional treat
but for every day we had to find food forms that
were more convenient.”

No company has done more than Mars to fins innovative ways to bring the benefits of cocoa flavanols to consumers in the form of
snacks. Currently the company is test-marketing its GoodnessKnows brand of “snack squares”. They include almonds, fruits, whole grains
and what Mars calls “deep chocolate” – delivering 200mg of Mars patented cocoa flavanols in each 36g serving.

56 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

Case Study 3:

Targeting the
technology
consumer

57 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 3. Probake 50 – new format brings a
healthy dose of protein
Having cracked the sports nutrition market,
Mathew Richardson of UK-based Applied
Nutritional Research has turned his attention
to the growing problem of sarcopenia in the
elderly.
Richardson built up a successful nutrition
bar and beverage business called Pro-Fibe
Nutrition before selling it to Irish dairy giant
Glanbia in 2005. Now this entrepreneur
with a chemistry PhD has developed a 50%
protein soft cookie called Probake50 which
he says will appeal to elderly consumers who
don’t like protein shakes and snack bars.
Sarcopenia – or muscle wastage – is a
condition that affects everybody to a greater
or lesser extent as they age. It’s a worry
because it impacts on a person’s strength,
which can put someone at a greater risk
of having a fall and breaking a bone. With
people increasingly living for longer in
developed countries it is a health problem that
threatens to reach epidemic proportions.
Although it is a condition caused by several
factors, including a lack of exercise, there
is general agreement among experts that
sarcopenia can be aggravated by a low intake
58
Healthy snacking
of dietary protein. “Elderly people have a
much higher need for protein because they’re
getting increased muscle wastage, so it’s
important for them to eat more protein as a
result,” says Richardson.
NON-MEAT PROTEIN IS KEY
However, he says, lifestyle and health issues
can make achieving high levels of protein
in the diet difficult. “Part of the problem is
that many elderly people don’t like eating lots
of meat because it gets stuck in their teeth
and they have problems digesting it. But
even if they do like meat, they have difficulty
assimilating the protein in it. Your ability to
assimilate protein shrinks after the age of 50.
“Someone in their 20s, if they eat whey
protein or beef protein, will get as much
benefit from either. Someone in their 60s will
get almost 100% of the protein from whey
protein, because it’s easily absorbed. But
they’ll probably get only about 60% of the
benefit of eating the protein from the beef.”
Protein supplements would, therefore,
appear to be the answer. But, says
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Richardson, the kinds of products currently
on the market don’t appeal to older
consumers. “Elderly people don’t like
drinking milkshakes or eating chewy Mars
Bar-type things. They just don’t eat them.
But they’ll always have a biscuit with a cup of
tea.”
Data from market analyst Kantar
Worldpanel supports Richardson’s assertion
that the elderly are heavy consumers of
biscuits. Its research shows that housewives
aged over 65 buy biscuits an average of 48
times a year; for housewives aged 28-35 the
frequency of purchase is 34 times a year
(figures for the year to September 2010).
Consequently Richardson has developed a
soft cookie concept containing 50% protein
– a level he claims is the highest to be found
in a biscuit product anywhere in the world.
The source of protein is listed only as “milk
protein” and “soy protein” on the label.
Richardson will not elaborate on this, stating
that the precise formulation is “sensitive
information”, though he does reveal that
the proteins used are designed to be easily
absorbed by the body.
59
Healthy snacking
STARTING WITH SPORTS
NUTRITION
The Probake50 cookie is actually already on
sale in the sports nutrition market, in White
Chocolate Almond and Double Chocolate
Chip flavours. “I’m only doing that because
it’s immediate business,” says Richardson.
“That pays for the staff, the bills and makes a
small profit.”
But the longer-term aim for Richardson
is to sell the concept into healthcare retail
channels where they will reach elderly
consumers. To that end, Probake50 is
currently undergoing trials at the Institute of
Ageing in Newcastle, just a few miles from
Applied Nutritional Research’s headquarters.
There, post-graduate researchers have
been looking at acceptance of the cookie by
elderly consumers. Richardson was confident
acceptance levels would be high. “I’ve used
my own grandparents as guinea pigs and they
like them,” he says.
After that, the researchers will turn
their attention to the serious business of
establishing how effective the cookie concept
is at addressing sarcopenia and malnutrition
in the elderly.
Probake50 is, essentially, ready for the
sarcopenia market, although Richardson says
he will most likely halve the size of the cookie
TABLE 4: WHAT’S IN PROBAKE50?
Ingredients:
Milk protein, hydrolysed gelatine, glycerine,
vegetable oil, chocolate chips (9%), soy protein,
oatflour, sugar, dietary fibre: gum acacia, baking
powder, flavouring, salt, sweetener: sucralose.
Nutrition per 75g serve:
Energy 320kcal
Protein 37.5g
Carbohydrates 20.1g (of which sugars 7.4g)
Fat 10g (of which saturates 3.9g)
Dietary fibre 1.1g
Sodium 0.27g
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 Healthy snacking

from the 75g manufactured for the sports
nutrition market in order to appeal to elderly
consumers. “That [75g] would be too big for
that market,” he says. “If you eat one, you’re
full – it’s like a meal – and that would be too
much.”
Running in tandem with the research at
the Institute of Ageing, Applied Nutritional
Research is now looking for other companies
to help it to develop the Probake50 concept
in the healthcare channel. “We’re developers,
not marketers,” he says. “Ultimately I am
looking to work with partners to bring this
product to market. Our aim is to go into the
healthcare channel over the next few years.”

BOX 6: APPLIED NUTRITIONAL RESEARCH

After selling Pro-Fibe Nutrition to Glanbia in 2006 Mathew Richardson spent two years as technical
director of Glanbia Nutritionals UK (which was the new name Glanbia gave to Pro-Fibe following the
acquisition).

When his contract expired in March 2008, Richardson established Applied Nutritional Research as a
vehicle for developing new concepts in food and nutrition.

As well as Probake50, Applied Nutritional Research has developed a new nutrition bar concept that
is highly competitive to produce because it doesn’t require baking. The company has its own factory,
which means it is able to produce cookies and bars for other companies to sell under their own
brands.

The company’s website explains its mission:

“At Applied Nutritional Research we take everyday foods you enjoy that are ‘unhealthy’ and give them a
nutritional makeover whilst preserving the taste! We reduce the fats, sugars and simple carbohydrates,
and replace them with protein, complex carbs and more nutritious grains, creating macronutrient super
foods.

In all our formulations we reduce the levels of fat (particularly saturated fat), sugar and salt, as we feel
that ethically it is wrong to have a food enriched with essential fats, fibre, protein etc and then have a
high fat or sugar content.

We attempt to create Healthy Junk Foods, where the nutritional balance has been adjusted without
compromising flavour and texture.

In order to do this we undertake in depth research into as many forms of Protein, Fibre, Carbohydrate,
Nutritional Fats, Grains and Supplements as possible. The research incorporates the nutritional
benefits of each ingredient, functionality within the food, stability to food processes and food
conditions, and interactions with other ingredients present.

We have developed our brand of high protein soft baked cookies. Each 75g cookie contains 37.5g of
protein from a blend of protein sources and has a drastically reduced sugar and fat content compared
to standard cookies. We believe that high protein cookies make a nice refreshing change to all the
same old boring protein bars and actually taste nicer too!”

60 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

Case Studies 4 & 5:

Targeting the
lifestyle consumer

61 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 4: Smaller, leaner, kinder: bars
tap into women’s needs
With the proliferation of nutrition-bar choices
in the US market over the last decade, one
truth seemed to have been lost on many of
the brands, whether mainstream or niche
better-for-you labels: Women make most of
the purchases in this segment, just as they do
in nearly every other CPG segment. And few
bars appealed directly and explicitly to the
perceived needs and wants of women.
But lately, a handful of nutrition-bar
brands, ranging from old-guard and
mainstream players such as Balance Bar to
new entrants such as Tasty, are refining their
appeal to women shoppers with new products
that address their perceived gender-based
needs.
“We saw a growing desire by women to
have their own products,” Michael Sands,
president and CEO of Valhalla, NY-based
Balance Bar, told New Nutrition Business.
“Females make up 50% of usage occasions
in the segment but 75% of the purchase
occasions. The needs of a female are a lot
different from those of a man, and from kids
– so couldn’t we design something specific
for them?” And, in fact, Balance Bar’s new
Nimble brand is meant to be exactly that.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF WOMEN
Other brands are taking a more oblique
approach to the women’s market, leveraging
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Healthy snacking
the overall features of the products rather
than a specific line or sub-line aimed at
women. (That includes ThinkThin bars, Case
Study 5). Kind Healthy Snacks, for instance,
uses transparent packaging for its entire line
of nutrition bars because “women like to be
able to see what they’re getting; they don’t
like surprises,” said Erica Bliss Pattni, vice
president of marketing for the New York-
based company.
In any event, these brands try to stay away
from what can be the trap of considering
female customers as some kind of generic
block, and that makes the proposition of
catering to women more challenging. “We try
to think about different kinds of women, not
just one type – the mom driving an SUV in
Cleveland is different from a college student
in Seattle,” Pattni said.
Here’s a look at how a handful of nutrition-
bar brands from across the industry spectrum
deal with the women’s market:
Balance Bar. A private-equity firm
bought the brand from Kraft two years ago
with the conviction that “with the previous
ownership, it wasn’t a priority to bring a
bunch of innovation” to the category, as
Sands put it. The goal of the new owner,
Greenwich, Conn.-based Brynwood Partners,
he said, is “to bring a ton of innovation” to
nutrition bars.
Aiming at the start to hone its product line
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more for women, Balance Bar has introduced
new female-oriented flavours such as lemon
meringue. But such minor gambits have
remained under Balance Bar’s signature
positioning, its “40-30-30” nutrition principle:
40% of the bar’s calories from carbohydrates,
30% from quality protein, and 30% from
dietary fat, the aim of which is to create long-
lasting energy.
Nimble is one of the first fully gestated,
major sub-brand initiatives that Sands has
introduced. It is available for a suggested
retail price of $8.99 (€6.35) for a box of 12
bars or $1.29 (€0.91) per bar, a premium to
Balance Bar’s Gold line. Nimble comes in
Dark Chocolate Strawberry, Peanut Butter,
Yogurt Berry and Chocolate Chip flavours.
Nimble represents an attempt to create a
female-tuned “all-in-one” nutrition bar and
fuse it with a “beauty-from-within” message
with the addition of some other specific
nutrients. “We could have done just another
Luna has led the female-specific nutrition-bar segment since 1999; the company’s latest bar, Luna Protein, taps into what women
want: “The protein trend is hot for women right now,” said Luna’s brand director Paula Connelly.
63
Healthy snacking
nutrition bar and stopped right there and
said, ‘This is the best all-in-one bar on the
market’,” Sands said. “But we wanted to
take it a step further and be more innovative
because the category isn’t that innovative.
And we wanted to bring an incremental piece
of business when we came to market.”
DAILY CONSUMPTION RULES OUT
SOY PROTEIN
So Balance Bar surveyed women about what
they might want in such a bar and found, of
course, that “it’s got to taste great,” Sands
said. “They also told us it’s got to have no
more than 120 calories” compared with 200
calories in the typical Balance Bar. At only
32g apiece, the bars also are “small and tiny”,
as Sands put it – thus the name Nimble.
Protein was also essential, Sands said. And
while Balance Bars rely on soy protein, the
company took a different approach with
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Nimble, in part because Sands wanted to be
able to position the new sub-brand as a daily-
regimen product rather than one aimed at
only occasional consumption.
“We asked women to tell us what they
wanted and we would make that, and so we
made it all whey protein in Nimble and no
soy protein,” he said. “Soy is good, but if
you’re going to be eating something like this
every day, you’d like to not worry about how
much soy you’re getting.”
Nimble also was formulated as an excellent
source of other nutrients that women said
were important to them, including fibre,
calcium, iron and vitamins D and B6. Nimble
is also the first bar to be sweetened with
Truvia, the stevia brand from Cargill.
The idea for making Nimble consumption
a “daily regimen” is tied to what Sands called
the “beauty bonus” in the bar – lutein and
carotene. “Lutein is known to help with eyes
and proven to help with skin hydration, as is
carotene and vitamins A and E,” he said. “If
you eat a Nimble a day for two weeks, the
CHART 9: MASS-MARKET SALES OF LUNA BAR, THE LEADER IN THE WOMEN’S NUTRITION BAR
SEGMENT
Sales shown are in supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandise outlets, excluding Walmart and
sales in C-stores and natural product stores. Adding these back, total sales of Luna Bars are estimated
to be about 50% higher than those shown here.
70
60
50 $45.190
$43.764
$ $4.877
millions 40 $4.710
30
$39.865
20 $38.706
10
0
2007 2008
Source: Infoscan Reviews, SymphonyIRI Group
Clif Luna Bars Clif Luna Sunrise bars
64
Healthy snacking
lutein should start to demonstrate its benefits.”
Yet, Sands stressed, Balance Bar isn’t
marketing Nimble as the provider of “beauty
from within” because that specific positioning
isn’t credible to women. “Anyone who has
done beauty positioning before [with a bar]
has put it on the merits of beauty, and that
was a mistake,” he said. Nimble, he explained,
“isn’t a beauty-from-within bar. It’s an all-in-
one nutrition bar with a beauty bonus. It has
a beauty benefit, but if the beauty doesn’t
work, you’re getting the best nutrition bar on
the market.
“Consumers easily believe if you put cream
on your skin, you’ll get immediate [beauty]
results. They’re a little more hesitant if
it’s something you need to consume. This
bar needs to stand on its own merits. This
positioning is a lot more believable.”
Nestlé. This spring, Nestlé Performance
Nutrition and its PowerBar brand launched
a co-branded women’s energy bar with the
Iron Girl Event series. Iron Girl consists of 13
events nationwide, including half-marathon
$64.126
$60.238 $3.375
$2.108 $3.592
$3.527
$44.161
$4.141 $57.155
$54.597
$39.603
2009 2010 52 Weeks
Ending
15th May, 2011
Clif Luna Protein bars
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 Healthy snacking

races and triathlons. cravings.”

The Iron Girl Energy Bar for Women
“supports the active lifestyle of adult women,
whether training for an event or getting
through a busy daily routine,” said Neel
Premkumar, brand development manager
for Power Bar. It includes calcium, iron
and B vitamins. Available in Strawberry &
Cranberry and Cocoa Crunch flavours, Iron
Girl bars are priced at a suggested $0.99
(€0.70) each, far less than many other bars
with a female market orientation.
Luna. Clif Bar launched this women-
specific brand in 1999 and, in many ways,
Luna has led the female-specific nutrition-
bar segment since then. “Success brings
competition, and now there are many bars
that appeal to women,” acknowledged Paula
Connelly, Luna brand director.
But she noted that many competitors
are diet or weight-management bars. “We
believe that diets do not work,” Connelly said.
“They are all about deprivation and denying
your cravings, and we all know deprivation
backfires. We believe in honouring your
Thus, Luna’s most recent offering, Luna
Protein, offers what Connelly called “a unique
blend of protein and fiber [to] satiate your
hunger.” Luna Protein also is gluten-free.
“The protein trend is hot for women right
now,” she said.
Available in five flavours – Chocolate,
Chocolate Peanut Butter, Chocolate Cherry
Almond, Cookie Dough and Mint Chocolate
Chip – Luna Protein includes both soy and
whey protein, for instance, and each bar
comes in at under 200 calories.
Kind. Retail sales of Kind bars were
projected to be about $70 million (€49
million) last year. The suggested retail price of
the regular, 200-calorie bars is $1.99 (€1.40),
in 11 flavours of the Fruit & Nut variety
and in eight flavours of Kind Plus, “with an
additional nutritional boost.” Five-pack boxes
at the suggested price of $5.99 (€4.23) are
available in four flavours. Kind Minis – in
smaller portions – are available in selected
flavours.
The brand’s overall positioning is

TABLE 5: TASTY ORGANIC PUMPKIN PIE CEREAL BAR NUTRITION FACTS

Nutrition Facts
Seving Size 1 bar (35g)
Servings per container 5
Amount Per Serving
Calories 120 Calories from Fat 20
Total Fat 2.5g
Saturated Fat 0g
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 0mg
Sodium 85mg
Total Carbohydrate 25g
Dietary Fiber 3g
Sugars 15g
Protein 2g
% Daily Value Children (1-4) Ages 5 & up

Protein 4% 4%
Vitamin A 2% 2%
Vitamin C 0% 0%
Calcium 2% 2%
Iron 6% 4%
Thiamin 20% 10%
Riboflavin 20% 10%
Niacin 25% 10%
Vitamin B6 30% 10%
Folic Acid 20% 10%
Vitamin B12 70% 35%
Selenium 100% 30%

Sugar is lower in Tasty bars than most other cereal bars, and fibre is higher, from whole grains – those things are of more
concern to women shoppers, according to the company.

65 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking
do-goodism, which the company believes
particularly appeals to women. The startup
began with promises to fund liberal causes
out of its proceeds from selling Kind Fruit
and Nut and Kind Plus nutrition bars with
the slogan, “Be Kind to your body, your taste
buds and the world”.
“We’re a brand about kindness; our goal is
to make the world a little bit kinder, and we
wrap that into products and our marketing
initiatives,” said Pattni. “Women really
cling to that rather than men. They tend to
appreciate brands that have human values
more. And we hear more often from women
that they love what we’re doing with our
social mission.”
How does that translate into tailoring Kind
bars toward women? “By look and branding
it’s important to us not to alienate men,”
Pattni said. “But we know more often than
not our buyers are women, and that’s very
important.”
So, for example, Kind created Minis,
“which allows women to eat them a few times
a day throughout the day and not feel bad
about it”. Also, Kind Plus varieties largely
are aimed at the specific nutritional needs
and perceptions of women. One variety, for
example, is Cranberry Almond, with added
antioxidants; another is Almond Walnut &
Macadamia, with extra protein; and Mango
Macadamia has added calcium.
And Kind’s marketing is skewed hugely
toward women, relying on media coverage
in women’s magazines, influencing
nutritionists who tend to be women, and
making placement appearances on cable-TV
Kind created Minis to allow women to eat them a few times a day throughout the day and not feel bad about it, while Kind Plus
varieties largely are aimed at the specific nutritional needs and perceptions of women.
66
programmes featuring women, including
Rachael Ray. “Women are more often looking
for a healthy snack whereas men are just
more likely to find something at retail and just
pick it up,” Pattni explained. “Our strategy is
to be recommended by influencers, including
chefs and celebrities – people women look to
for advice.”
Tasty. Liane Weintraub launched her
Calabasas, Calif.-based company as a
purveyor of frozen organic baby foods. But as
the enterprise has grown, Tasty has branched
out to introduce organic cereal bars as well,
aimed largely at the moms who already were
buying Tasty baby food.
“A regular cereal bar is really a glorified
cookie, so we set out to build a better bar with
fillings that include vegetables as well as fruit,”
Weintraub explained. “We started out with
pumpkin pie and carrot cake flavours, and we
also have sweet potatoes and dates baked into
the crust. They have higher fibre than most
bars.”
Typically, she said, “The bars originate as
a purchase for the whole family, but they’re
eaten mostly by the female and the kids.
Calories are low, and of course stereotypically
that is the line on the nutrition panel that is
most often read by women. Sugar is lower
than most other cereal bars, and fibre is
higher, from whole grains – those things are
of more concern to women shoppers also.”
Each box of Tasty bars contains five 1.23oz
(35g) bars and retails for a suggested price
of around $1 (€0.71) a bar, which Weintraub
said “is really competitive for an organic bar”.
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 Healthy snacking
Case study 5: ThinkThin Bars’ wellness
platform resonates with women
The recipe is simple. Combine almonds,
peanuts and honey in a bar. Leave out the
gluten and use as little sugar as possible.
Add proprietary protein blend and put in
a package to go. The finished product is
California-based Think Product’s best-selling
thinkThin nutritional snacks and protein
bars. Enjoying several high-profile celebrity
endorsements and more than 50% growth,
the brand looks to be a driving force in
the nutrition category this year. The secret
ingredient may be its single-platform message
about eating right for good health and to be
your best, which nicely blends a natural and
weight management position in a way that
resonates with consumers, especially women.
The concept is gaining steam. According
to SPINSscan Research, thinkThin is the
number one-ranked weight management
bar in the natural energy bar category and
posted a 72% gain in market share in the
third quarter of 2010; 2010 revenues were
$32 million (€23 million). “We haven’t done
one retail presentation, including those for
Whole Foods Market’s national and Trader
Joe’s, where the buyers haven’t said we are
a driving force in the nutrition category,”
said CEO and founder Lisanne Falsetto.
New reduced calorie Bites come in four flavours – chocolate toffee nut, cookies and cream, white chocolate raspberry and dark
chocolate – and contain 0g sugar and 5g of protein.
67
The company also benefited from recent
unsolicited endorsements from celebrities,
such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Courtney Cox.
But the range didn’t start with a grand
vision to remake any category. For Falsetto,
formulating products with high protein,
low- to no-sugar and gluten-free just made
sense personally. She began by making snacks
to suit her active lifestyle, first as a student
athlete, then as a professional model and
finally as a mother juggling pressures of
work and family. She eventually used that
nutritional background to launch Think
Products.
Starting the company 12 years ago, Falsetto
didn’t have an inside line that weight issues,
sugar and gluten would be the hot buttons
they are today. “I just didn’t feel good when
I ate foods with gluten and sugar, and I knew
I needed protein. So I made products that
worked for me.” Other than keeping an eye
out for new technical and flavoring options,
which she noted are increasing every day,
Falsetto said she believes the products taste
good and work well for sports performance
and weight management. But, she noted, she
is always looking for new components that
could enhance the texture,, flavour and taste
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 Healthy snacking
of the bars.
The company currently offers 10 different
protein bars, with 10 flavours including
chunky peanut butter, chocolate espresso
and tangerine cremesicle. The nutrition
statement touts 15-20 grams of protein, zero
sugar (sweetened with maltilol), and the bars
are gluten free and range from 200 to 240
calories.
Newer additions to the line include the
200 calorie thinkThin crunch bars, with 10
grams protein and 3-4 grams of sugar, and
thinkThin bites, a 100-calorie version of the
protein bar, with 5-8 grams of protein. The
Crunch bars feature mixed nuts that are
either plain or with chocolate, white chocolate
or caramel chocolate, and claims 70% less
sugar and 80% more protein than the average
fruit and nut bar. Reduced calorie Bites come
in four flavours: chocolate toffee nut, cookies
and cream, white chocolate raspberry and
dark chocolate.
A LIFESTYLE FOCUS
Women respond to the thinkThin bars
because they are about weight wellness and
lifestyle rather than weight loss, Falsetto said.
Again, this mirrors her personal philosophy.
She believes in eating good, pure food, which
contributes to vitality and a healthier life. “We
don’t believe that women should feel guilty
about who and what they are.”
Everything about the line, from its stripped-
Billed as “a major breakthrough in the healthy nut bar category”, thinkThin’s new Crunch claims to have 70% less sugar and 80%
more protein than fruit and nut bars. Crunch has 10 grams of protein.
68
down nutritional profile to the simple white
packaging, is designed to communicate that
message and help change the way people
think about diet and weight. “This is really
about lifestyle. We put good food in a package
to go. And people are striving for that. They
need more time, and they want fresh and
easy,” Falsetto said.
The product marketing material describes
weight wellness as “an optimal weight
range at which our bodies feel healthy and
happy. This is not defined or dictated by
aesthetic, shape, weight or tape measure – it
is the emotional outcome of feeling good,
energized, funny, confident, sexy and living
a life filled with joy and laughter.” The
company’s website sticks to basic product
information, but also engages customers
to submit their success stories to get free
product. In keeping with this lifestyle rather
than weight-loss approach, the site now also
features gluten-free recipes, such as a brown
rice tabouli and an orange and banana fruit
smoothie.
PACK, BRAND STORY APPEALING
TO WOMEN
ThinkThin bars, which are, incidentally, one
of the few protein bars that has successfully
tapped into the female market, uses a white
package featuring the logo and tag line
“deliciously natural nutrition” along with the
statement about protein, sugar and gluten.
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 Healthy snacking
The approach is a departure from typical
protein products, which often use male weight
lifters in advertising and on packaging. The
minimalist design and advertising is just as
powerful for what it doesn’t say as for what
it does, according to Falsetto. “It’s true that
protein has always been thought of as a
component for a male attribute, but we are
trying to communicate that women, especially
as they get older, need protein in their system
for many reasons.”
Beyond the nutritional appeal, the brand
also resonates with women, because they
increasingly identify with Falsetto, a business
entrepreneur and single mother of two, who
is becoming a more prevalent face for the
range. Her public personae expanded recently
with the diagnosis of her daughter’s allergy to
gluten.
Though Falsetto has long been an advocate
of gluten free, she is now even more actively
engaged in raising awareness of Celiac
Disease. The company recently sponsored
the first annual thinkThin Los Angeles
area Celiac Disease, Gluten-Free walk in
conjunction with Natural Products Expo
West. “As a mother who has overcome the
challenge of not knowing that my daughter
had allergens to gluten, I look forward to
joining other families to raise awareness of
Celiac Disease and share the benefits of
TABLE 6: NUTRITION AND INGREDIENTS FACTS FOR THINK THIN PROTEIN BAR (DARK CHOCOLATE)
69
a gluten free-diet,” she said in a prepared
statement about the event.
SPECIALTY CHANNELS NEXT ON
THE AGENDA
To capitalize on all this recent momentum,
the company is working to expand further
into its established sales channel – grocery,
drug and natural. ThinkThin will also put
a new focus on specialty channels, such
as gyms, spas, hotels and airlines. “We do
very well anywhere that people need quick,
portable food, so we are targeting core areas
where there is emphasis on food to go, such
as airports, coffee shops and smoothie bars.
Really, it is any place someone might buy
candy,” Falsetto explained.
The company is also targeting corporations
that have a health and wellness agenda or
programme, such as hospitals and progressive
companies, like Google and Patagonia, for
their onsite cafeterias and gift shops.
Though Falsetto is still trying to quantify the
brand’s growth so far this year, she expects it
to be on par or higher than in 2010 with the
new sales channels. She added that the range
is doing very well in natural, mass grocery and
drug stores as a part of their natural foods
aisles. “As a wellness and lifestyle brand that is
where we fit best,” she said.
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 Healthy snacking
PREMIUM SPOT IN THE PANTRY
Falsetto notes that these aisles are also where
sales are dominated by full boxes rather than
single bars. “We know we are now a pantry
item because people are buying the full box
of bars to have on hand as snacks for the
family.”
This fact makes thinkThin different from
major bar competitors, such as Clif Bar,
Lara Bar and Balance Bar, which tend to
sell as single bars at lower price points, she
explained. Acknowledging those companies
for building the category, Falsetto said “we
would certainly not be here if not for those
products, but the category is now very
competitive and price sensitive. They may be
scanning more bars with special prices, like
a 10 for 10 sale, but we are driving growth
because we don’t lower our margin for sales.”
70
Think’s strategy is to always stay in the
premium price range. The single bars retail
at $1.99 (€1.34), but drops to $1.69 (€1.14)
per bar for a box of 10 bars and $1.59
(€1.07) per bar for higher quantities. Typical
competitors, like Clif, Lara and Balance,
range anywhere from $1.09 (€0.73) to $1.99
(€1.34) per bar but average at $1.25 (€0.84)
per bar if purchased in a box.
As to the future, Falsetto is close-lipped as
to upcoming product launches, but will say
they are working to reproduce their winning
formula in the salty, savoury snack category.
“Our goal is to come out with foods that you
can find in all the aisles of the supermarket.
We want to be a household brand name, like
Kashi, bringing people better bars, better
cereals, better frozen food. We can definitely
follow that dynamic.”
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Case Study 6:

Targeting the
mass market

71 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 6: Kraft Belvita Breakfast –
giving people permission to have a sweet
snack at breakfast
Kraft has done the seemingly impossible,
launching a new brand which has successfully
created a new, super-premium, health-
oriented but yet also mass-market segment of
the sweet biscuit market.
UK consumers have always enjoyed a
biscuit with their mid-morning or afternoon
cup of tea, but the concept of a biscuit for
breakfast is a new one to them. But despite
its novelty, a new biscuit brand from Kraft
billed as “a totally new way of having some
breakfast” has quickly become a success –
even priced at a more than 400% premium
over a standard biscuit.
The UK does not have a culture of
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Healthy snacking
consuming biscuits for breakfast – unlike
France, Belgium and the Netherlands where
the Belvita brand is popular and long-
established – but that did not stop Kraft
from launching Belvita in the UK in late
2010. In a crowded and static UK biscuit
market, creating a new consumption occasion
was a way to get a new brand into the
market without competing head-on with the
established brands.
It’s a strategy that appears to have
succeeded. Belvita Breakfast – which carries
the Kraft-owned Nabisco brand - has had
an excellent first year, earning retail sales of
£20.7m ($34 million/€24 million) in the 52
weeks ending 18th June 2011, according to
Neilsen data. The success came on the back
of a £3 million ($4.8 million/€3.5 million)
marketing spend in the first year, which Kraft
says will be increased to £4 million ($6.5
million/€4.5 million) in the second year.
Belvita Breakfast biscuits are described as
“delicious, crunchy biscuits specially designed
for breakfast”, touted as “a tasty, convenient
and portion-controlled alternative to current
breakfast options – whether at home, on the
go, or at work”.
Available in two variants – Fruit & Fibre
and Milk & Cereals – the 12.5g biscuits are
thin and light and the signature ingredients
used – fruit, milk, cereals – all have a
“naturally healthy” aura. In January 2011
Kraft built on its rapid success by extending
the Belvita range with two new variants – a
Honey & Nuts and a Crunchy Oats format.
In July 2011 it added to the range Belvita
Breakfast Yogurt Crunch – described as
a sandwich of “live yoghurt between two
wholegrain biscuits”.
The brand is described as free-from
artificial flavours and colours. The
continued on page 74
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 Healthy snacking

BOX 7: SLOW RELEASE ENERGY A KEY PART OF KRAFT BRAND POSITIONING

Kraft Belvita Breakfast Biscuits has focused heavily on a “slow release” message in its marketing. Packaging
carries a graphic on the front and the side panel that is intended to convey the idea of slow release of energy.

73 www.new-nutrition.com

continued from page 72
recommended serving of 4 biscuits delivers
216 calories, 12.4g of sugars and 8g of total
fat, of which 2g is saturates. Each serving also
delivers 16% of the RDA of vitamin B1 and
8g of wholegrain per 50g serving.
The product is available in a 300g box
containing six sachets of four biscuits and a
50g single-serve 4-pack. The 300g box retails
at around £2.19 ($3.60/€2.50) – equivalent
to £7.30 ($12.00/€8.35) per kilo. On a price
per kilo basis that’s a massive 414% premium
over McVities Digestive biscuits – the biggest
brand by far in the UK sweet biscuit market
– which retail for an equivalent of £1.42
($1.64/€1.62) per kilo.
This pricing makes the brand’s success,
against the backdrop of a flat-lining economy,
all the more remarkable.
Key to Belvita’s initial success has been that
it has given mass-market consumers who may
wish to eat healthily at breakfast but do not
do so – instead grabbing a muffin or a pastry
at Starbucks or a similar outlet on the way to
work – the permission to choose sweet biscuits
for their first meal of the day.
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Healthy snacking
The positioning of the brand is very skillful
and is key to the product’s success. The aim is
clearly to enable women who would like to eat
healthily – or at least tell themselves that they
do – to make Belvita their breakfast choice
without any feelings of guilt.
Marketing and labeling communicates
clearly that:
A pack of 4 Belvita Breakfast biscuits is a new
and delicious way to start your day!
BALANCED BREAKFAST =
PERMISSION TO EAT BISCUITS FOR
BREAKFAST
There are two steps to the Belvita message.
The first is messaging on the pack and in
advertising which tells people that biscuits can
be part of a healthy breakfast:
What is a balanced breakfast?
4 Belvita Breakfast Biscuits
+ 1 serving of dairy
+ 1 portion of fruit
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On the product label the “balanced
breakfast” message appears in three different
ways.
SLOW-RELEASE CARBS
The second part of the message that reassures
people that they can eat sweet biscuits for
breakfast and still feel virtuous is the emphasis
on slow energy-release carbohydrates.
A graphic on the side of the package
(see illustration on page 73) reinforces the
balanced breakfast message and adds:
They are carefully made and gently baked so that,
as part of a balanced breakfast, the carbohydrates are
regularly released over 4 hours to keep you going all
morning.
This has been proven in several clinical studies.
BRITS EUROPE’S TOP BREAKFAST
SKIPPERS
Belvita targets young professional women,
aged 25-35, living in urban areas, particularly
those who have to commute to work. Many of
these people already skip a breakfast at home,
according to a pan-European consumer
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Healthy snacking
survey, commissioned by Kraft, which
investigated comparative breakfast habits.
Kraft says that the UK tops Europe’s
breakfast skipping table with 34% of UK
adults missing the most important meal of the
day, compared to only 17% in France, 18% in
Italy and only 13% in Spain.
The study also showed that:
• nearly one in ten Britons (8%) never eat
breakfast, with men (38%) and people
in their twenties (55%) most likely to
skip
• 37% of people say that they skip
breakfast because they have no time
and have too many other things to do
in the morning, which, alongside not
being able to face food at that time
of day or not being hungry (38%), is
the biggest reason people give for not
having breakfast
• one third of skippers choose to stay
in bed longer (29%) and a quarter is
spending time on their appearance
each morning instead of having
breakfast
www.new-nutrition.com

MARKETING
The UK launch was supported by a major
promotional campaign, worth £3 million
($4.8 million/€3.5 million) which appears
to have been focused on the London
metropolitan area – where the target
consumer, breakfast-skippers who face long
train journeys to work each day, might be
expected to be concentrated.
The launch TV campaign featured
breakfast radio presenters, Johnny Vaughan
and Lisa Snowdon, whose morning radio
show is broadcast only in the London
area. The ad aired for four weeks and ran
across the core target’s most highly-viewed
programming on terrestrial and satellite
channels.
The TV campaign was accompanied by
an 8-week print campaign, and integrated
with PR, an advertorial programme, retail
promotions and sampling.
Advertising agency Euro RSCG created
a series of outdoor ads to promote Belvita
Breakfast. The “dynamic digital ads” included
daily and hourly updates and have been
running in high profile sites throughout the
capital.
With over 30 sites across top spots in
the London Underground, National Rail
stations and key roadside sites the ads talk
directly to the busy commuter empathising
with their hectic schedule and suggesting the
ideal breakfast solution for their busy lives.
76
Healthy snacking
Messages on the digital ads were targeted at
actual individuals on the station.
A GOOD START FOR A NEW BRAND
There has been some criticism in consumer
blogs and online forums of the benefit
promised by Belvita Breakfast, particularly
the high sugar content, with some bloggers
comparing the sugar content unfavourably to
that found in cupcakes.
Nevertheless, blogs may be less influential
than many bloggers and marketers like to
think and negative comments have been no
restraint on Belvita’s success.
Belvita Breakfast has had a good first nine
months, with Neilsen data showing a retail
sales value of more than £10.7 million ($17.6
million/€12 million). Pro rata this success to
a much larger market, such as the US, and
Belvita would be equivalent to an $80 million
brand.
Belvita are already ranked third in the UK’s
sweet Healthy Biscuit category, and were the
number one Healthy Biscuits innovation in
2010, according to Neilsen data. The UK’s
£2.2 billion ($3.4 billion/ €2.5 billion) biscuit
category grew by 2.9% over the same period.
If anyone wants to see how to successfully
create a new segment of an indulgence
market by skillfully delivering a health
message that the mass-market consumer
wants to hear, Belvita Breakfast is the brand
to study.
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 Healthy snacking

BOX 8: BELVITA TV ADVERTISING

UK radio personality Johnny

Vaughan sees his colleague Lisa
Snowdon eating a biscuit (he is
unwrapping a greasy egg-filled
bread roll):

Johnny Vaughan: “Hang about, Lise

- this is a breakfast show, not an
elevenses show!”

Lisa Snowdon: “No, Johnny - this

happens to be a delicious new
Belvita, a totally new way of having
breakfast.”

Johnny Vaughan: “Biscuits

for breakfast, whatever next,
marmalade for lunch?”

Lisa Snowdon (reading from pack):

“New Belvita Breakfast biscuits
are made from wholegrain and are
specially designed for breakfast.
They will regularly release
carbohydrates over four hours as
part of a balanced breakfast”.

Johnny Vaughan: “Does this mean

you’re going to talk more than
you normally do? Aaargh!” (as the
tomato sauce he is squeezing onto
his bun explodes all over it).

Voiceover: Belvita Breakfast.

Biscuits specially designed for
breakfast.

77 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 7: Fiber One – an expert
brand in digestive health
The world’s biggest digestive health brand
– outside the yoghurt category – is General
Mills’ Fiber One. Thanks to a focus on the
core benefit of providing a healthy and
effective dose of fibre in a good-tasting
and convenient way, Fiber One’s sales have
rocketed since 2006, when the current
strategy was put in place. The key driver
of the brand’s growth has been snack bars,
which account for over 60% of total brand
sales.
Worldwide, the value to consumers of
products that can help them maintain good
digestive health is reflected in the outstanding
performance of many probiotic digestive
health brands even while the global economy
was in recession. In the US, for example,
Danone Activia probiotic yoghurt for digestive
health grew its sales by 20% in the year
to March 2010 – well above the category
growth rate of 3% and despite adverse
media reporting of a legal threat to Activia’s
claims – to a total of over $412 million (€338
million).
WHY FIBER MATTERS
In its survey of consumers and their
perspectives on health in 32 countries around
the world, research group Health Focus has
found that digestive health ranks among
consumers’ top-4 health concerns that affect
them personally. The most common gut
health issue worldwide – and one that fibre
plays a key role in alleviating – is constipation,
which affects up to 35% of the population,
and as much as 80% of some groups of
elderly people.
Understanding which consumers have the
highest motivation to purchase a fibre-fortified
product for digestive health – and creating
a brand which is able to establish credibility
in the minds of these consumers – is key to
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Healthy snacking
success. In terms of target consumers, fibre is
often described as having mass-market appeal
and potentially appealing to every type of
consumer. And while it’s true that there are
many groups of consumers who are interested
in digestive health, the core buyers of such
products, the only two groups who it will
really be worth targeting with your marketing
communications, are:
1. Women.
2. Over-40s (and particularly over-60s).
Fibre technologies have experienced
significant new developments in recent years
that have provided many new opportunities
for product development. Furthermore,
the development of fibres with differing
textural effects, and the understanding of
their innovative utilization in a wide range
of foods and beverages, has also increased
dramatically. An ever-increasing number
of ingredient producers are refining and
introducing dietary fibres that, alone or in
combination, produce familiar digestive
benefits.
As a result of the confluence of
technological improvement with consumer
need, products that make a virtue of their
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 Healthy snacking

fibre content are being launched in ever-
increasing numbers.
However, the most commonly-adopted
strategy with fibre (perhaps 95% of all
products launched) has been along the lines
of the “fibre make-over”. It’s a low-risk but
also low-return strategy – and one that does
little in terms of either increasing volumes
of existing products or getting better profit
margins. You can get much better sales and
profits by creating an “expert brand” and
this is illustrated best by General Mills’ Fiber
One. Originally launched in the US in the
mid-1980s, from 2005 it was given new life,
expanded to 20 products in six categories
(including bars, each of which delivers a
dose of 35% of the RDV of fibre), and
communicated with the very strong tagline
“Cardboard no. Delicious yes”. Consider that
despite a recession, Fiber One grew by 20%
in 2010, to total sales of over $261 million
(€200 million), according to supermarket

CHART 10: RECESSION-PROOF DIGESTIVE HEALTH – THE RISE AND RISE OF FIBER ONE
Sales are in US supermarkets (excl. Walmart)
300
$281.00
280 $11.00
$261.00
260 $11.00 $41.00
240 $41.00 All other products
220 Yoghurt
200 $200.95 $76.00
$57.00 RTE cereal
$7.19
180 Cereal bars
$40.93
160
140
$40.93
120
$104.06
100
$40.32 $152.00 $153.00
80
$112.50
60
40 $36.71 $63.74
20 $36.71
0
2006 2007 2008 2009 2011
(year to June 12)
Source: Infoscan Reviews, Information Resources, Inc. (IRI)
General Mills’ Fiber One has become the first “expert brand” in the benefits of fibre. Its extraordinary
growth, despite a recession, shows the value to consumers of a digestive health brand that enables you to
“feel the difference”.

79 www.new-nutrition.com

scanning by Symphony/IRI, which doesn’t
include Walmart (add back likely Walmart
sales and it’s a $300 million/€230 million
brand).
What makes the achievement all the more
impressive is that Fiber One products grew
between four times and 10 times the rate of
growth of most of the categories in which the
brand competes.
The overall growth of the Fiber One brand
isn’t just a matter of General Mills extending
the brand into new categories. Even the oldest
parts of the lineup are achieving vibrant
sales growth. As the first mainstream expert
brand in fibre, Fiber One was first to market
– itself an important success factor for health
TABLE 7: FIBER ONE OAT & CHOCOLATE BAR INGREDIENTS & NUTRITION FACTS
80
Healthy snacking
products of all kinds – and backed by heavy
investment it is unmatched by any other
brand.
General Mills spokesperson Kim Harbinson
told New Nutrition Business that Fiber One
“stands apart [because] we not only deliver
convenient food options that are packed with
fiber, but our products taste good.” In fact,
Harbinson said, “the flavour and texture of
our Fiber One branded items must meet a
high standard in likeness tests” to non-Fiber
One products in the company’s lineup. In
fact, reassuring consumers about the taste
of Fiber One is a core part of the brand’s
communications.
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 Healthy snacking

Case Studies 8, 9 & 10:

“Naturalness” – the
biggest trend

81 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 8: PepsiCo transforms the snack
food aisle into the natural food aisle
In a bold move, described by Frito-Lay Chief
Marketing Officer Ann Mukherjee in an
interview with the CBS News programme as
“probably one of the most evolutionary things
we have ever done at Frito-Lay”, the world’s
biggest snack-food company is reformulating its
products so that approximately half the snacks it
sells in the US will use only natural ingredients,
America’s biggest potato chip brand, with more than $1 billion
in annual retail sales, now makes all-natural and “free-from”
everything of concern to health-conscious consumers a core part
of its brand promise.
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Healthy snacking
a process which it aims to have completed by the
end of 2011. The company is communicating
the new benefit with one of its biggest-ever
marketing campaigns.
The move, Frito-Lay recently told investors, is
aimed at “transforming the snack food aisle into
the natural food aisle”. John Compton, CEO
PepsiCo Americas Foods, described the switch to
“all natural” as one of the company’s four points
of “laser focus” for 2011.
PepsiCo-owned Frito-Lay’s strategy is symbolic
of how the message that a product is “natural”
has evolved from one that offers differentiation
and growth to a basic requirement that every
brand must meet in order to compete in the
mass market.
Such is the market power of Frito-Lay, the
biggest marketer of salty snacks in America and
in the world, that by the end of 2011:
• all-natural products’ share of America’s $3.1
billion (€2.2 billion) potato chip market will
jump to 65%
• 40% of the $2.2 billion (€1.6 billion) tortilla
chip market will be all-natural (and if Frito-
Lay later converts its Doritos brand, which is
not included in this year’s plan, to all natural,
then the market will be at least 80% all-
natural
Around 60 products have been reformulated, a
major effort that will have added to Frito-Lay’s
product costs. The products all carry the stamp
“Made with natural ingredients. No artificial
flavours. No MSG. No preservatives”. The
market-leading Lay’s potato chip brand, which
has annual retail sales in excess of $1 billion
(€711 million) now promises that it is:
• 0g trans fat
• Gluten-free
• Additive-free
continued on page 84
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 Healthy snacking

BOX 9: NATURAL FOODS ARE THE NEW STANDARD IN THE SUPERMARKET: PEPSICO’S STATED GOAL
IS TO TRANSFORM THE SNACK AISLE INTO A NATURAL FOOD AISLE

Source: PepsiCo

83 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

continued from page 82

• Casein-free tests, Frito-Lay says, “all-natural” performed well,

• Lactose-free
• MSG free
• Onion Free
• Porcine-free
• Soy-free
In support of its move Frito-Lay cites IRI
research claiming that the health attribute
“natural” is the second-most popular with
American female shoppers aged 20-50, with
30% of American consumers actively seeking
snacks with a “no preservatives” message.
In 56 of its own consumer studies and taste
with “all-natural” performing as the number one
claim and scoring the highest purchase intent.
The switchover to natural ingredients is
an element in PepsiCo’s push into healthier
products. Chairman and CEO Indra K. Nooyi
wants to build its healthy brands into a $30
billion (€21.3 billion) business by 2020 – more
than double sales of its healthier products today.
In recent years, Frito-Lay has eliminated trans
fats and reduced saturated fats in its snacks.
The switch to “all-natural” goes hand-in-
hand with a 25% reduction in sodium across
its snacks portfolio – although this is not

84 www.new-nutrition.com

being communicated to consumers. Typically,
consumers associate reductions on sodium with
poorer taste and many companies have learnt
the hard way that as a health benefit it’s a
double-edged sword.
For now, Frito-Lay is holding off on converting
its billion-dollar Doritos brand and its half-
billion dollar Cheetos brand to all-natural
ingredients. Those products, with bold flavours,
are more challenging to reformulate and their
core consumers are teens and younger male
consumers who might actually be turned off if
they were told that their favourite brand was “all
natural”.
MARKETING TO TRUMPET “ALL
NATURAL”
Frito-Lay is slapping “all natural” stamps on
its packaging as it rolls out the reformulated
snacks and it is supporting the change with
TABLE 8: LAY’S “ALL-NATURAL” POTATO CHIPS INGREDIENTS & NUTRITION FACTS
85
Healthy snacking
what is described as the company’s largest-ever
marketing campaign. Elements include:
Television and print advertising:
Focused on the actual Frito-Lay employees
behind the products made with natural
ingredients, from the people who buy the
ingredients, to company chefs who create new
products. Frito-Lay is highlighting their “seed to
shelf story”. The “all-natural” communication
builds on a discovery Frito-Lay made that many
Americans didn’t believe there were actual
potatoes in Frito-Lay chips. In response in 2009
it launched an advertising campaign featuring
local potato farmers who supply Frito-Lay and
has continued to build on this with advertising
that commuicates the “simple ingredients”
message.
All the advertising can be viewed at http://
www.youtube.com/user/OfficialFritoLay
In-store promotions: In-store
communications will focus on the easily
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 Healthy snacking

identifiable stamp on the package stating it was
made with all-natural ingredients and will be
backed by a heavy investment in merchandising
throughout the store (see box).
COMMENT
Frito-Lay’s motivation is of course to boost sales
of its chips. Frito-Lay North America’s sales grew
just 1% in 2010. The company believes that
the all-natural message is “very motivating” to
consumers and that – based on test marketing of
selected products with an “all natural” message
which produced 8% sales growth – stronger
sales growth can be achieved across the entire
portfolio.
Certainly the new message and marketing will
produce an uplift in sales – but the experience
of making “natural” a standard message in any
category is that it’s a one-time lift. Frito-Lay’s
projected 8% growth across such a vast portfolio
of brands is likely to be on the optimistic side,
since it would require either, or both, a significant
increase in consumption by existing consumers
and new consumers entering the category. And
to do so on a scale sufficient to have a significant

CHART 11: THE NUTRITIONAL PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE – HOW TRENDS EVOLVE

Pepsi has test-marketed several “all-natural” brands targeting the lifestyle consumers, such as Flat Earth.
Pepsi’s decision to make its
mass market brands “all-natural” shows how this trend has evolved to be a “standard” in the mass market. The
stages of the life cycle are:
Technology consumers – Early adopters, people who have a near-medical need for a product. They will pay a
substantial premium for something that addresses their condition.
Lifestyle consumers – Interested in maintaining their wellness, not fighting illness. They will adopt new brands
and will pay a premium if it supports their lifestyle.
Mass-market consumers – Motivated when a benefit becomes a standard and is available in products with low
or no premiums, ideally from well-known and trusted brands.

Technology Consumers Lifestyle Consumers Mass-market Consumers

Solid line = sales volumes

A growing trend
“Natural” – established in
the mass market, there is no
Sales ggrowth
grrowth opportunity.
wth

Broken line = unit selling price

6% - 8% of consumers 20% - 25% of consumers 67% - 74% of consumers

TIME

Source: Mellentin & Wennström, The Food & Health Marketing Handbook

86 www.new-nutrition.com

effect on brands whose sales are already
measured in the billions of dollars is a stretch –
especially as the people most motivated by the
all-natural message are already well-served by
many existing all-natural brands.
Over the years, Frito-Lay has already made
several forays into the all-natural area in snacks,
some of them successful, most of them not. A
few years ago it created a natural version of
most of its mainstream snack brands, only to
discover, as so many companies have, that being
natural doesn’t work as a line extension. It also
tried to create several new snack brands with
natural credentials, such as Flat Earth and True
North. These brands were not failures, rather
they fell foul of a large company’s inability to
87
Healthy snacking
slowly and patiently grow small brands and the
false urgency to make everything a $100 million
success overnight – a strategic goal which was
achievable in food and beverage 20 years ago
when todays’ CEOs were at the start of their
careers, but now is rarely achieved.
Although Frito-Lay may not get the degree
of sales increase it is hoping for, its strategy is an
important one and a sign of how “natural” – in
the sense of free-from artificial preservatives,
colours and flavours – has ceased to be a point
of difference and is now is a core consumer
requirement across all categories.
“Natural” is no longer a trend that you can
follow to deliver growth for your business – it’s
simply a basic requirement of being in business.
www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 9: Wonderful Pistachios – making
natural into a super-premium success
It’s ten years since the FDA approved a heart
health claim for nuts and in that time only
almond growers have successfully exploited
the value of the claim. Now pistachios have
also become a success – with a strategy
that reflects how good marketing is more
important than a health claim in creating
success.
In ratcheting Wonderful Pistachios up to
a $200 million (€145 million) healthy-eating
success story within two years, Paramount
Farms has applied several pages from the
playbook of its other major brand, Pom
Wonderful pomegranates.
Both brands employ edgy advertising
that creates curiosity among consumers and
buzz among the media cognoscenti. Both
Wonderful Pistachios and Pom Wonderful
juice rely mostly on the intrinsic health
benefits of their basic commodity rather
than too much enhancement with other
ingredients. Both have placed big bets on
supply expansion.
And both the pomegranate-juice and
pistachio businesses have bet there’s magic in
the word “Wonderful.”
“We’ve had this historical success with Pom
Wonderful and we were looking for a brand
that we could build over time that would tie in
nicely with communicating the health benefits
of pistachios,” Marc Seguin, Paramount
Farms brand manager, told New Nutrition
Business.
Wonderful Pistachios certainly has become
that. Last year, thanks to the initiation of
the brand’s fun, celebrity-laden marketing
campaign in the fourth quarter, sales ended
up about 65% higher for the full year than for
2008, which was Wonderful’s first year in the
market.
Seguin expected another strong double-
digit surge in sales during the fourth quarter
88
Healthy snacking
of 2010 to bring Wonderful to about $200
million (€145 million) in revenues for the full
year, a level of sales that already is challenging
that for Pom Wonderful, which has been in
the market for much longer.
And as the only nationally established
brand of pistachios, Wonderful already
accounts for about 70% of the overall
domestic sales of a commodity whose strong
growth in the US it almost solely has driven.
Paramount Farms cleans, roasts and packages
about 30% of the pistachios in the entire
world.
This success shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Paramount’s Los Angeles-based owners,
Lynda and Stewart Resnick, pulled off the
same sort of thing with Pom Wonderful:
identifying an under-appreciated but healthful
commodity crop that lent itself to California
weather, buying enough land and planting
enough trees to become the dominant
domestic grower, strategically securing ample
water supplies, and then turning the product
into a marketing phenomenon.
Pom Wonderful has run into some trouble
over the last few years from its own temporary
supply constraints, competition from big
beverage companies that have come out with
their own pomegranate-juice drinks, and most
www.new-nutrition.com

recently a lawsuit by the federal government
that alleges Pom Wonderful has been too vivid
in marketing health claims for its products.
Wonderful Pistachios has managed to
avoid similar such problems so far even as it
has borrowed heavily from Pom Wonderful’s
strategy in the marketplace. Just as with
pomegranates, Wonderful Pistachios’
advantages start with its unparalleled scale in
the pomegranate business – such a powerful
standing that the Resnicks were able to break
up a farmers’ cooperative in California that
until three years ago governed how nearly all
of the state’s pistachio growers went about
their business.
As a commodity, pistachios enjoy a
number of advantages. For one thing, they
benefit greatly from Americans’ ever-rising
appreciation of tree nuts as nutritionally
beneficial. Despite their high fat content
and the fact that most consumers like them
salted, “There’s an overarching kind of health
awareness about nuts,” Seguin said.
“When you layer in the fact that we’re a
good source of fiber, and pistachios especially
Wonderful Pistachio’s fun marketing extends to this free app which challenges users to crack as many pistachios as they can.
89
Healthy snacking
have antioxidants and that sort of thing, we
feel like in general – relative to snacks like
chips and pretzels – we’re in a much better
position.”
Pistachios specifically enjoy the distinction
of their light green colour and the fact that
after processing they tend to barely peek
from behind their slightly opened shell. “It’s a
product that everyone loves to eat, and they’re
fun to eat,” Seguin noted. “That allows us
to get people into the health benefits of
pistachios by using what they already know
about them: that they’re fun and taste good.”
FOLLOWING ALMONDS’ EXAMPLE
Besides the lessons of Pom Wonderful, the
company also watched closely what almond
growers and brands have done with their
commodity (Paramount Farms also grows
and sells almonds). “They have a laser focus
on getting people to understand how healthy
almonds are,” Seguin said. “We saw that as
a model for replicating a consistent health
message over a long period of time and
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 Healthy snacking

BOX 10: WONDERFUL PISTACHIOS’ QUIRKY TELEVISION ADVERTISING

Wonderful Pistachios recruited quirky B-list and “naughty” celebrities for its adverts, including TV star
Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi (top), footballer Chad Ocho Cinco (centre), and Lewis Black (bottom) known for
his “angry rant” comedy style.

You can view these ads at:

http://getcrackin.com/?vidid=1527#sidebar_video_thumb_1527
http://getcrackin.com/?vidid=1528#sidebar_video_thumb_1535
http://getcrackin.com/?vidid=1530#sidebar_video_thumb_1530

90 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

getting it ingrained in people’s minds.” that we do so that the message is very

Paramount launched the Wonderful
Pistachios brand about three years ago, just
as America was entering the recession. That
would seem to have been a problem for a
premium-priced nut that retails in an 8oz (225
g) bag for a suggested $3.99 (€2.89 ) – in the
neighbourhood of cashews, macadamias and
almonds rather than, say, cheaper peanuts
and sunflower seeds.
But Wonderful Pistachios began proving last
year that control of the majority of the crop,
along with clever marketing, can elevate savvy
brands above concerns about price elasticity.
Wonderful garbs its nuts in snappy green and
black packaging, for instance.
“Green represents the inside of the
pistachio, as well as healthy goodness, and we
wanted to carry that forward with everything
consistent and carries a brand impression,”
Seguin said.
The brand also cut out the middlemen
and dispatches its own merchandisers to its
major retailer customers around the country,
arriving in Toyota Priuses emblazoned with
green brand signage. Such top-to-bottom
control of its supply chain also has enabled
Wonderful Pistachios to penetrate unlikely
new outlets such as the upscale Nordstrom’s
department stores.
FUN AND ‘NAUGHTY’ ADS CREATE
BUZZ
And Wonderful borrows freely from the
resources of Hollywood just down the road.
In the initial version of its “Get Crackin’”

CHART 12: THE IRRESISTIBLE RISE OF THE WONDERFUL SNACK BRAND

US retail sales in $ millions in supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandise outlets (excluding
Walmart) – a further $80 million (€58 million) of sales is in other channels. Since its launch in 2007, the
US snack nut market has grown by 20% – and almost half of the total market growth has been driven by the
Wonderful Pistachio brand.

165 $153
(€105.44)
150

135 $122.777
(€88.774)
120

105

90

$ $71.122
75 (€51.425)
millions

60

45 $33.613
(€24.302)
30
$9.084
15 (€6.567)

0
2007 2008 2009 2010 52 Weeks
Ending
Source: Infoscan Reviews, SymphonyIRI Group June 12, 2011

91 www.new-nutrition.com

advertising campaign in 2009, Wonderful
recruited B-list and some “naughty”
celebrities such as a star of the hit TV series
Jersey Shore; an American Olympic swimmer
distinguished by her accomplishments even
in middle age; and the infamous former
boyfriend of politician Sarah Palin’s daughter.
“These are people who aren’t necessarily
known that widely but could create some buzz
and who have audiences that create a strong
mosaic of consumers,” Seguin explained.
With an eye toward prime nut-consumption
occasions including the winter holidays and
snacking at Super Bowl-watching parties in
early February, the ads focused on how people
open pistachio nuts differently, liberally using
Wonderful’s signature bright green, but also
were heavy on health messaging such as
“lowest-fat nut” and “lowest-calorie nut.”
“We needed to be able to capture people’s
attention visually,” Seguin said. “When you
have that, you can deliver a meaningful health
Following the lead of almond growers and brands – with their “laser focus” on communicating the health benefits of almonds – Wonderful
Pistachios intend to “ingrain” the pistachio health message in consumers’ minds.
92
Healthy snacking
message without getting overly complicated.
There really hadn’t been any communication
on a broad basis about pistachios, so we
wanted to start with what people might know
about pistachios.”
Sales rose as much as 80% each week
during November and December 2009
compared with the year earlier, Seguin said,
pushing Wonderful’s overall sales about 65%
higher for the year – “in an economy,” as he
noted, “that overall wasn’t showing much
growth.”
In fact, after the marketing campaign was
over, sales into 2010 continued at such a
robust pace that Paramount Farms almost
ran out of pistachios. Pom Wonderful
experienced a huge drag on sales a few years
ago when newly planted trees weren’t yet
mature enough to supply crop expansion to
meet fast-growing sales demand. But Seguin
insisted Wonderful Pistachios will avoid such a
problem.
www.new-nutrition.com

“It takes about seven years for a newly
planted tree to produce pistachios,” he said.
“But we have a number of new trees that
have been in the ground now for five and six
years and so we’ll be able to grow our crop
size overall by 20%-30% over the next few
years. That’s plenty of supply.”
So Wonderful Pistachios didn’t let up in its
efforts to boost sales, launching Round Two
of its “Get Crackin’” campaign in the fourth
quarter of 2010. The celebrities in the new
campaign included Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi
– a star of MTV’s reality-TV series Jersey
Shore – as well as Rod Blagojevich, the former
governor of Illinois, who was convicted
in the summer of 2010 of lying to federal
investigators.
Overall advertising spending was expected
to be $20 million (€14.5 million) for this effort
compared with $15 million (€11 million) a
year earlier. “We’ve got 2,000-plus airings
of our commercials scheduled for airing on
many, many TV networks, reaching our target
consumers” – focused on 30- to 50-year-old
women – “each 10-plus times,” Seguin said.
Fueled by its quick success in expanding
the pistachios market, Wonderful Pistachios
93
Healthy snacking
launched another advertising campaign in the
spring, although on a smaller scale. “No one
has ever tried to market pistachios in [that]
half of the year,” Seguin said.
ADDING FLAVOUR – AND VALUE
Wonderful Pistachios come in a variety of
package sizes and a variety of retail outlets,
but the brand does almost nothing to alter
its basic product or to boost its appeal with
seasonings or other enhancements.
Paramount Farms has left that chore to a
smaller brand called Everybody’s Nuts. These
pistachio products are available in flavours
such as Salt and Pepper, Chili and Lime, and
Roasted Onion.
“If there’s one sub-segment of snack nuts
that has been growing strongly outside of
one-nut product lines such as pistachios and
almonds, it’s flavoured nuts,” Seguin said.
Such products currently account for about
20% of the overall snack-nut business – but
for about 50% of growth.
“A lot of new SKUs are being introduced,”
Seguin said, “and they are especially
attracting more moms with young kids.”
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Case study 10: Nairns – product innovation,
“natural energy” from an expert brand in
oat-based snacks
When the management team at Nairns
bought their business out from United Biscuits
in 1996 their first challenge was how to
breathe new life into the 108-year-old Nairns
oatcake brand.
An oatcake is a flat disc of oats, what
Americans would call a cracker, made without
sugar and usually eaten as an accompaniment
to cheese. It’s a very traditional food in
Scotland, where it has been part of the diet
for hundreds of years. Nairns, a maker of
crackers and cookies based in Edinburgh, the
capital city of Scotland, was – and still is –
the market leader in the oatcake niche. But
in the late 1990s it was looking like a niche
without much of a future.
As the illustration below shows, back in
1996 the Nairns oatcake brand conveyed
strongly both its history and its Scottish
heritage.
“Repositioning and updating Nairns was
our first challenge,” recalls John Holroyd,
Nairns’ marketing director. “We conducted
Before –1996
Reinventing an old brand
94
Healthy snacking
consumer research and we were shocked
to find that the people under the age of
about forty who we thought were buying our
products in fact thought not only that Nairns
was not for them but it was a brand for their
grannies – too traditional even for their
parents!”
“We had always thought that we had a too-
traditional feel,” he adds, “but hadn’t realised
that it was seen as quite as old-fashioned as it
was.”
NEW PACKS, NEW MESSAGES
BRING NEW INTEREST
To Nairns’ management it was clear that the
oatcake was just as suitable for young people
as for old, so the findings from consumer
research acted as a spur to a new strategy.
“We wanted to take the opportunity to get
the nutritional benefits across – which a few
years ago, it should be remembered, not many
After – 2002
www.new-nutrition.com

companies were doing – and focus on our big
point of difference, which is oats.”
Step one was to bring the pack design up
to date. This required a complete break with
the then-design: “A revolution after years of
evolution,” Holroyd describes it.
“The new pack design didn’t seem to be
working well initially – we lost some of the
existing customers who didn’t recognize the
packs. Sales actually dipped for a while and
people began to say things to me like ‘that
was a brave redesign’. It was an anxious
six months, until we began to find the new
customers.”
The other big step was to add the message
“wheat free” prominently on the front of
the pack. The then-embryonic consumer
interest in a product being “wheat free” was
something that the company had picked
up from talking face-to-face with people at
consumer food shows. “We did very well with
that message because no-one was doing it
then,” Holroyd recalls.
The over-arching positioning of the Nairns
brand has consistently been a “naturally
nutritious” message – a tagline that appears
prominently on all Nairns packages and
advertising and which is expanded with
messages such as “no artificial colours,
flavours, preservatives or hydrogenated fats”.
A secondary message used on all packs
relates to oats as “Naturally energising” (see
box).
Nairns also emphasises taste and
enjoyment. “There’s quite a proportion of
people who think oats are boring and if
you go on too much about how healthy the
products are people think they may not be
enjoyable to eat,” explains Holroyd.
CATCHING THE LOW GI WAVE
The UK’s oats market advanced consistently
but unexcitingly, with the Nairns brand
growing faster than the total market, until
2005, when UK consumers’ awareness of oats
suddenly increased and in that single year,
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Healthy snacking
according to Nielsen data, sales of all oat
products, including Nairns, jumped by 30%.
“It was the year of low glycemic index,”
explains Holroyd. “Thanks to good advice
we were already aware of the whole GI issue.
We had known about it for a while but we
didn’t want to be too early, but we made our
decision to get the GI message on the pack
just at the moment when GI hit the public
consciousness and we got the timing bang
on.”
Interestingly, after the 2005 surge of interest
in GI sales of oat products did not fall, but
settled to a steady 5% annual increase.
Nairns didn’t neglect to improve what goes
inside the package, reformulating its oat cakes
to reduce salt levels down by 10% three years
in a row until the salt content was at the
lowest possible level.
The oatcakes use palm oil, as a way of
ensuring that the products have a shelf-life
that retailers and consumers expect and
are also free of hydrogenated fat. However,
environmental issues are high on the agenda
for Nairns management and the company
sources its palm oil from a supplier who is a
founder-member of an industry organization
called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm
Oil, which is developing a scheme that
defines, controls and rewards the growing of
palm oil on a sustainable basis and which is
due to be operational from the end of this
year. Closer to home, Nairns sources its oats
from within Scotland – where much of the
production is in the same region as Nairns’
factory – and only uses oats produced under
Scotland’s Rural Stewardship Scheme, which
means that the oats are grown without the
use of insecticides and the farmers meet
environmental standards in relation to wildlife
and natural habitat that are independently
audited.
BISCUITS A SWEET SUCCESS
The third big development in Nairns’ strategy
was the launch of a sweet oat biscuit in 2003
continued on page 97
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 Healthy snacking

BOX 11: OATS’ NATURAL “SLOW RELEASE ENERGY” ADVANTAGE

Nairns, the expert brand in oat

snacks, has made the slow energy
release properties of oats a key
message in its brand’s marketing
- a good example of “natural
functionality” communications.

96 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

continued from page 95

– the first time the company had launched

such a product. These have been a success,
driving growth in the total oat biscuit market,
and today account for 25% of the total sales
of the Nairns brand.
“It was a significant technical breakthrough
to make a good-tasting sweet biscuit using
only oats,” explains Holroyd. “The only
things on the market at the time and now
were gluten-free which were expensive and
poor eating quality.
“Making a sweet biscuit that uses oats
and no wheat and tastes good enough for a
mainstream consumer to want to eat it is a
significant technical challenge. That we have
been able to do what no-one else had is a
testament to our in-house production and
technical skills and our ability to partner with
people outside the company who bring extra
know-how.”
The development of the sweet oat
biscuits was the result of a two-year-long people avoiding wheat. They appeal to people
“knowledge transfer partnership” with who recognize the benefits of oats and to
Queen Margaret’s College – a university people who just like a good biscuit,” explains
with a focus on food technology, located in Holroyd.
Edinburgh. The partnership was supported The sweet oat biscuits have won both gold
with co-funding by Scottish Enterprise (SE), and silver at the UK’s Great Taste Awards –
a Scottish government body. SE funds a an important accolade as the competition’s
Health-enhancing Foods initiative which helps judges are chefs, food reviewers and
Scottish companies reinvent themselves for restaurateurs and the sole feature on which
the age of health. they judge a product is taste – not health.
The initiative has run in Scotland for There’s no doubt that with its pure-oat
seven years and has become one of the most sweet biscuits Nairns has created a new
successful of its kind in the world. segment of the biscuit market, increasing
“What we got at the end of the household penetration from just 1% to over
development was a product that people who 8% during the year to March 2008, according
are avoiding wheat will buy and actually to data from Dunhumby, which is derived
enjoy,” Holroyd adds. from sales of major retailers such as Tesco.
Since then customer feedback has shown Dunhumby also shows volume in the oat
that the sweet biscuits are in fact being bought biscuit segment growing over 100% and value
by many people who aren’t interested in the growing 75% in the same period.
wheat-free message. As a result the company
has changed the emphasis in positioning the GIVING CONSUMERS CONVENIENCE
product from “wheat-free” biscuits to “oat
biscuits”. Positioning its oat products as a healthy
“This has been successful because they have snacking option has been another pillar of
attracted a wider group than simply those Nairns’ strategy. Not only does the company

97 www.new-nutrition.com

provide a wealth of snack serving suggestions
for its traditional oat cakes, it has also moved
them into new and more convenient forms,
such as Mini Oat Cakes. Designed for use
with dips or canapés, each oat mini weighs
just 4g.
The focus on snacking has led Nairns to
its most recent innovation – Oaty Bakes. A
potato-chip-like product, but made with oats
instead of potato, the product was based on
an original concept by a professional product
developer called Liz Ashworth, who was
introduced to Nairns as a result of Scottish
Enterprise’s Health-Enhancing Food initiative.
For Nairns to get the product from concept
to market was a two-year process, followed
by a full year of test-marketing. “We could of
course have done it more quickly,” explains
Holroyd, “but the key for us is always first and
foremost to get a product that tastes good and
that’s not something you can cut corners to
achieve, particularly with a raw material like
oats and particularly when we’re taking them
into a new area of snacking.”
The products are in full distribution in the
UK with Tesco, the UK’s biggest grocery
retailer, and other chains such as Waitrose,
Sainsburys and Morrisons.
“It’s a more challenging concept to
The “naturally nutritious” brand position is consistently reinforced in advertising and carried on the side panel of all Nairns
products, along with a secondary message that links laterally to satiety and weight management – that oats “help you feel fuller for
longer so you don’t feel hungry again so soon”.
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Healthy snacking
communicate to the consumer,” explains
Holroyd, “and it takes time to build the
awareness of a new product such as this.”
The company has learnt enough, he says, to
have already made improvements to two of
the recipes, enhancing the eating quality, and
introducing a new sweet chilli flavour.
Getting the new snack product
merchandised in the place where it will most
help sales has been a learning experience,
with one chain putting the Oaty Bakes with
the crackers near other brands with health
credentials – the place where Nairns would
like to be and the place that produces the
best sales – while another has put them
in its healthy eating aisle. “A less-desirable
location,” comments Holroyd.
TAKING OATS TO A WIDER MARKET
Unusually for a small company, Nairns is
boldly taking its brand into international
markets. The “wheat-free” message was
particularly well-received in the US, where
Nairns is stocked coast-to-coast by natural
product retailers such as Whole Foods Market
and is establishing a niche position as a
premium brand. Nairns can also be found on
sale in Australia – where the brand is going
www.new-nutrition.com

into mainstream supermarket distribution –
New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere.
International sales don’t yet define Nairns’
business, but it’s a good illustration of the
long-term, consistent and ambitious nature
of the company’s strategy – a strategy
that has seen Nairns nurture its point of
OATY BAKES ARE THE LATEST INNOVATION FROM NAIRNS
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Healthy snacking
difference – oats – and focus on making the
most of its technical skills in oat baking to
produce innovative products. And the reward
for reinventing the oatcake and helping to
reinvent oats as a modern snack-food is sales
that have quadrupled over the last five years to
over £16 million ($29 million/€19 million).
www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

BOX 12: CREATING A FREE-FROM ADVANTAGE FOR OAT SNACKS

Nairns has sourced a variety of oats which is cultivated

because it is guaranteed to be gluten-free and used this
to launch its first-ever gluten-free line, which is approved
as suitable for coeliacs. The company uses production
facilities segregated from its other lines.

100 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

Case Studies 11, 12,

13, 14 & 15:

Fruit & Vegetables

101 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 11: Nature Addicts – Europe’s
most successful new snack brand
Like Wonderful Pistachios in America, the
Nature Addicts brand has created a new
category with a simple, all-natural snacking
proposition.
One of the most successful product
launches in Europe in 2010, after initial
success in France the brand has since been
rolled out in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany,
Switzerland and Italy. Nature Addicts is a
perfect case study for anyone to learn from
who wants to understand how to create a
success in healthy snacking.
The company behind Nature Addicts,
Solinest, is the leading player in the
confectionery market in France, with
particular expertise in the “impulse” segment.
It distributes brands such as Chupa Chups,
one of the biggest confectionery brands in
Europe, among others.
102
Healthy snacking
The company made a strategic decision in
2008 to debut in healthy and partnered with
a European company which specialises in
manufacturing 100% fruit snacks – all based
on fruit purees rather than fruit concentrates
and juices. After a year of brand development
and consumer testing, Solinest launched the
Nature Addicts’ fruit snacks brand in France
in mid-2009.
STRONG ALL-NATURAL
POSITIONING
The brand has a clear naturally healthy
proposition with messages on pack and in
advertising as follows:
• no added sugar
• no sweeteners
www.new-nutrition.com

• no preservatives
• no artificial colours or flavours
• 100% fruit
• contains 3 times as much fibre as the same
weight of an apple
• naturally high in fibre
• without any chemical manufacturing
process
CONVENIENT FORMATS, SMALL
PORTIONS
Nature Addicts includes two formats in a wide
range of flavours:
• 15g bars in single or twin-packs, in
strawberry, peach and raspberry flavours.
Described as “super practical”.
• bites (very small pieces of fruit shapes
called “pepites” in French) in 30g and
100g packs. Flavours include: raspberry,
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Healthy snacking
blackcurrant, strawberry, peach and
orange-cranberry and blueberry-
pomegranate. Described as: “For a 100%
fruit break, where you want it, when you
want it.”
• 40g fruit sticks, the newest addition to
the line, in apricot-peach and strawberry-
banana. Described as “For fun!”
The packs are re-sealable and have a
premium look and feel.
Nutritionally, a 30g sachet of bites has
just 100 calories and 24g of sugars – all of
which is sugar that is naturally present in the
fruit. On a 100g basis that makes the sugar
content 79g, which many would argue is high,
however most consumers accept the presence
of sugar in good-tasting things – which is
why confectionery markets are so large. They
are particularly relaxed about sugar content
www.new-nutrition.com

if what’s offered is only what is naturally
present – with nothing added – and that is the
strength of the Nature Addicts proposition.
The high sugar content is balanced also
by the low calorie count in each portion-
controlled pack as well as the brand’s 100%
fruit and all-natural credentials.
Nature Addicts – abbreviated to N.A! on
the label and in advertising – also makes a
strong play about the natural fibre content of
its products. Fibre content is 1.8g per 30g.
MARKETING AND MERCHANDISING
The launch of Nature Addicts was one
of the most professional that the snacking
category in Europe has ever seen and similar
in scale and scope to the successful launch of
Wonderful Pistachios in the US.
Solinest doesn’t disclose any data, but the
heavy investment in print and TV advertising,
merchandising, POS materials, a website
and Facebook page and an extensive PR
campaign is estimated by one advertising
executive who spoke to New Nutrition Business
104
Healthy snacking
to have cost over €2 million ($2.9 million).
PREMIUM PRICING, SALES
SUCCESS
N.A.! products are super-premium priced:
• €1.59 ($2.28) for 30g pack of small bites.
• €1 ($1.44) each for the 15g bars.
In other words, on a price per kilo basis, the
brand sells at:
• €53 ($76) per kilo for the bites
• €66 ($95) for the bars
This puts the product at a huge premium
to fresh fruit, but on a price per pack basis
the brand is comparable with many other
snacking products in the impulse section of
the supermarket.
These prices show how much people are
willing to pay for health and convenience.
Despite super-premium pricing, 2010 retail
sales were €20 million ($29 million), according
to industry estimates. Bearing in mind that
www.new-nutrition.com

France has a population of 60 million, that’s
equivalent to a €100 million ($144 million)
brand in a large market such as the US.
This accomplishment is made all the more
impressive by the fact that French consumers
have become very price-sensitive in every
category in the supermarket.
One of the keys to N.A!’s success is good
merchandising. Solinest has strong existing
access to stores of all types and sizes and it
has effectively leveraged this to get the brand
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Healthy snacking
on-shelf in almost every possible impulse
situation, near cash-registers in all the major
supermarket chains, as well as petrol stations,
convenience stores and other outlets.
Nature Addicts created a point of
difference in the snack market and in France
has effectively created a new category. It has
leveraged convenience, naturalness, taste and
merchandising skills and has backed its idea
with a significant and consistent marketing
spend.
www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

BOX 13: TELEVISON ADVERTISING FOR N.A!

Voiceover:

To keep you from sinning all day [as woman

attempts to cram fruit into her bag]

N.A!.It’s new.

It’s nothing but fruits concentrated into pieces

and bars.

It’s 100% fruits

No added sugars

No sweeteners

No preservatives

N.A!. Nature, it’s in your pocket.

106 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 12: Castus fruit snacks – a hit with
Danish children
Castus is part of the Whole Company, a
Danish group that owns businesses marketing
a range of food and beverage products,
including healthy snacks, teas and dietary
supplements.
The Whole Company acquired Castus
from Unilever in 2003, at a time when the
brand was selling 4.2 million fruit bars a year.
Since then, it has transformed Castus into
Denmark’s leading fruit bar brand.
Castus fruit bars are principally aimed
at the children’s market, where they are
positioned as the perfect healthy solution for
lunchboxes (all children in Denmark take
packed lunches into school every day) and as a
wholesome snack between meals.
There are several varieties, all made from
a recipe based on dates, with each individual
bar weighing 25g:
• Fig (dates 54%, figs 41%, vegetable oil,
water)
• Nut mix (dates 86%, hazelnuts 5%,
peanuts 4%, vegetable oil, water)
• Strawberry (dates 75%, raisins 20%,
dried strawberry 1%, vegetable oil, water,
natural strawberry flavour)
• Pear (dates 95%, dried pear 1%, vegetable
oil, water, natural pear flavouring 0.1%)
Castus realised it needed to change its branding for the UK market, opting for boxes rather than pouches and calling its bars “Be
Fruity”, which resonated better with British consumers.
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Healthy snacking
• Banana (dates 79%, bananas 18%,
vegetable oil, water)
• Raisin (dates 68%, raisins 24%, apricots
1%, vegetable oil, peanuts 3%, water)
• Apricot (dates 67%, apricots 26%,
vegetable oil, water, acidity regulator: citric
acid)
• Blueberry (dates 73%, raisins 20%, dried
blueberries 3.5%, vegetable oil, water,
natural blueberry flavour)
ALL NATURAL, HIGH FIBRE
The products are all marketed as being 100%
natural, containing no artificial ingredients.
They are also positioned as being high in
dietary fibre, with each 25g bar containing
between 2.5g and 3.5g, depending on the
recipe.
As well as providing a nutritious alternative
to less healthy products, Castus fruit bars are
offered as a more convenient and less messy
alternative to fresh fruit and yoghurt. The
bars are sold in pouches, in packs of five, for
DKK15 (€2.00/$2.87), which the company
says means each bar costs roughly the same
as a piece of fresh fruit. The brand is worth
around DKK100 million at retail level (€13.4
www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

million/$19.1 million). Norway, Sweden and Finland. The company

Castus bars have wide distribution in
Danish supermarkets, where they are typically
sold in multiple locations – alongside fresh
fruit, in the ambient grocery aisle and, of
course, with other snack products. The brand
is prominently promoted in store using point
of sale displays and merchandise (such as
branded footballs) designed and provided
by Castus. The brand is also advertised in
women’s magazines.
Castus estimates that around 80% of the
products it sells are eaten by the target market
of children, but that the remaining 20% are
eaten by adults. As a result, it is looking into
the potential for launching a fruit bar with a
more grown-up positioning.
UK A RICH SEAM – BUT DIFFERENT
APPROACH NEEDED
The success of the Castus range in Denmark
has led to its recent launch into nearby
also identified the significantly bigger UK
market as a potential rich seam of sales and
launched its bars there about 18 months ago.
Henrik Winther-Olsen, managing director
of Castus, says: “The population is much
larger in the UK, and the snack bar category
there is very developed. There are lots of
different fruit and muesli bars in the UK and
we could see demand there was growing.”
In the UK, Castus sells 4.5 million bars a
year. With five bars in a pack, and a retail
selling price of around £2.00 (€2.26/$3.30),
this equates to a brand worth roughly £1.8
million (€2 million/$2.97 million).
Castus took great care to research the UK
market in depth before launching there a year
and a half ago. For example, it held focus
groups, where it was pleased to discover that
British consumers liked the products – and
particularly their all-natural positioning.
But based on other responses from the
participants, it made some changes to the

TABLE 9: INGREDIENTS AND NUTRITION FACTS FOR CASTUS FRUIT BARS (STRAWBERRY)

FRUIT BARS WITH STRAWBERRY

Ingredients Nutritional values Allergens Storage Net weight
Fruits: 96% (dates 75%, May contain traces Keep dry and One Fruit bar:
raisins 20%, dried pr. 100 g pr. frugtstang of peanuts and not too warm. 25 g
strawberry 1%) Energy kJ/kcal 1330/320 330/80 other nuts. Castus Fruit
vegetable oil, water, Protein 2g 0-1 g Bars don't
natural strawberry Carbohydrate 65 g 16 g need cool
flavour. - of which sugars 63 g* 16 g* storage.
Fat 5g 1,5 g
- of which saturates 2g 0-1 g
Dietary fibre 9g 2,5 g
Sodium 0g 0g
* NO ADDED SUGAR

108 www.new-nutrition.com

product proposition.
It opted for a different brand name – Be
Fruity – which the company found resonated
better with British consumers than the original
Danish brand Castus (which means ‘pure’ in
Latin).
It also gave the product a new look, with
consumers having expressed a preference
for a different kind of brand design. Castus
also decided on new outer packaging – a box
instead of a pouch – because this brings Be
Fruity into line with other snack bar multi-
packs in Britain.
The company went to the trouble of
setting up a UK subsidiary in a bid to crack
the market there. This course of action was
considered preferable to using an importer.
Winther-Olsen says: “The problem with
working with a distributor is that you may
be competing with other brands they are
representing. We felt that the UK market was
so interesting so we would put the maximum
effort into it.”
Unlike many fruit snack products, many of which are based on concentrates and closer to confectionery than to snacks, Castus
highlights its fibre content.
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Healthy snacking
The Be Fruity products are based on the
same recipes as Castus bars in Denmark.
Three products from the Castus range are
available: Apricot, Strawberry and Fig. They
are listed with supermarket operator Waitrose
and health food chain Holland & Barrett.
GETTING RETAIL BUYERS’
ATTENTION KEY TO SUCCESS
Winther-Olsen admits that Castus has so far
been disappointed by the performance of Be
Fruity in the UK. The company had hoped
sales would be greater in a country whose
population, at 60 million people, is more than
10 times the size of Denmark’s.
He says it has proven difficult for Castus’s
representatives in the UK to meet with
retailers. Part of this, he explains, is down to
the fact that buyers frequently change jobs in
the UK. “There is a new buyer every second
month,” he says wryly. “It’s very hard to get
in.”
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 Healthy snacking

This state of affairs, he says, is compounded

by the fact that it is a struggle for a small
brand such as Be Fruity to command buyers’
time in the face of competition for their
attention from much larger companies. “It’s
very difficult because we only have our Be
Fruity brand. We’re not like a Nestlé or a
Unilever, who have a whole range of products
they can talk to their customers about.”
Castus has also been restricted in its ability
to undertake marketing. Unlike Danish
retailers, UK supermarket chains do not
usually allow manufacturers to create branded
displays in-store. Winther-Olsen says Castus
will invest in more marketing, but only when it
can achieve more listings.
Ironically, in spite of all this, Winther-Olsen
says Waitrose has actually been pleased with
sales of Be Fruity and recently increased the
number of stores in which it sells the bars.
However, at this point in time Castus remains Henrik Winther-Olsen, managing director of Castus – which
means “pure” in Latin – has seen his company conquer the
frustrated in its efforts to gain further listings Danish market and now Castus has its sights set on bigger
with other major retailers, although David challenges. “The UK market is absolutely one of our highest
priorities,” he says.
Cross, joint managing director of Castus
UK, tells New Nutrition Business that he is
“anticipating listings shortly with Sainsbury’s According to Cross, the Be Fruity adult
and Tesco”. range will be introduced to the trade at the
Castus remains committed to the UK beginning of 2012, as part of a “phase two
market for now, despite the challenges it has launch” for the brand.
faced there. “The UK market is absolutely one Meanwhile, back in Denmark Castus has
of our highest priorities,” says Winther-Olsen. just appointed a dedicated export manager
Indeed, the company has also developed a to evaluate opportunities in another 10
range of Be Fruity bars aimed at adults. These countries in Europe. Having made its mark
will be slightly larger than the kids’ bars (30g) on the Danish snack bar category, it is clear
and offer a coarser structure with whole pieces that Castus is now committed to taking its
of fruit. There will be three varieties: unquestionable domestic success to markets
further afield.
• Cranberry, fig and nuts
• Mixed nuts
• Apple, cinnamon and nuts

110 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 13: Frito-Lay’s fruit and vegetable
snack brand ambitions fall to earth
How is it that Frito-Lay’s Flat Earth snacks, a
brand judged as one of Symphony/IRI’s top
20 new product launches in 2007, with a loyal
following and innovative product, can be deemed
a failure?
PepsiCo unveiled its Flat Earth brand at a
meeting with securities analysts in October 2006,
after which Frito-Lay CEO Al Carey couldn’t say
enough about the bright future he predicted for
Frito-Lay in Flat Earth.
“We’re looking forward to [Flat Earth chips]
making a significant contribution to Frito-Lay’s
growth in healthy snacking,” Carey told the Wall
Streeters gathered in New York. “We want to
make healthy snacking our absolute top priority.”
At the same time, Carey was sanguine about
the marketplace possibilities for Flat Earth:
“The intent to purchase [among tested
consumers] is probably the highest we’ve ever
seen. It’s off the chart … This is a terrific new
product that will give us an opportunity to make
Flat Earth’s redesigned packaging (right) made more of the product’s vegetable content and gave consumers a clearer message
about what flavour they’d find in the bag.
111
Healthy snacking
fruits and vegetables a dynamic success in the
snacking world.”
Clearly, the debut of Flat Earth in February
2007 was part of an increasing trend in which
mainstream snack companies have begun to join
a handful of boutique snack makers in folding
significant portions of fruits and vegetables with
grains into traditional chips. Kraft, for example,
rolled out Roasted Vegetable Ritz Crackers in
June, emphasising on the box that the product is
“Made with real vegetables”.
Flat Earth chips contain a half-serving of fruits
or veggies per ounce, or about 11 chips per 28g
(6oz) bag.
Each 2g serving has less than 5g of fat and
about 130 calories – approximately the same as
many of Frito-Lay’s other snacks, most of which
have been reformulated in recent years to have
significantly reduced fat, sodium and calorie
levels.
The rice- or potato-flake-based chips, which
www.new-nutrition.com

are baked, not fried, were initially available
in six varieties of vegetable and fruit flavours:
Farmstead Cheddar, Garlic Herb Garden,
Tangy Tomato Ranch, Wild Berry Patch, Apple
Cinnamon and Peach Mango Paradise. The
suggested retail price was $2.99 (€2.38) for a
6oz bag, a small premium over Fritos, PepsiCo’s
market-leading potato chip brand.
MAINSTREAM AMBITIONS FOR A
NICHE PRESERVE
Previously, such chips were largely the domain
of niche firms such as Terra Chips, but Carey
nevertheless said that Frito-Lay was persuaded
that fruit and vegetable chips are “a huge
idea with consumers” in the mainstream and
that the company needed to make a play in
the segment. The increasing attention being
paid by nutritionists, the news media, the food
industry and consumers to the “significant gap”
between recommendations of fruit and vegetable
consumption, and what Americans actually eat,
was another factor, he said.
The company had considered such products
CHART 13: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF FLAT EARTH
Sales in supermarkets, drugstores, and mass merchandise outlets (excluding Walmart).
30
$26.20
(€20.6)
25
$21.95
(€17.27)
20
$
millions
15
10
5
0
2007
Source: Infoscan Reviews, SymphonyIRI Group - the leading global provider of enterprise market information solutions
Healthy snacking
before, Carey noted, but always encountered one
huge problem:
“Consumers are quite sceptical, because most
other products have either tasted good and
haven’t been that good for you, or they’ve been
good for you and haven’t tasted good. Moms
couldn’t get their kids to eat them”.
In fact, the size of the challenge that Frito-Lay
perceived in developing Flat Earth is indicated
by the name of the product as well as the line’s
logo on the packaging: a pig with wings.
“We knew consumers were sceptical and
would say to themselves that there would be
this kind of a product – with no compromise
between taste and nutrition – ‘when pigs fly’,”
Carey said. “But we came up with a product that
is ‘impossibly good’ in the way that it does both.”
EARLY SUCCESS
Launched in supermarkets at the beginning of
2007, Flat Earth jumped to over $26 million
(€20.5 million) in retail sales in its first year,
according to Symphony/IRI supermarket
scanning data – meaning that its sales were over
$10.72
(€8.44)
$5.04
(€3.97)
2008 2009 52 Weeks Ending
Jun 13, 2010
112 www.new-nutrition.com

$30 million (€24 million) when sales in Walmart
are taken into account.
As a result Symphony/IRI told Frito-Lay
late in 2007 that Flat Earth was likely to qualify
as one of its top 20 new product launches of
the year – and the only one under the rubric
of a fully new brand – the company gave itself
a deserved pat on the back. “We were really
proud of that,” Jennifer Saenz, associate brand
manager for Flat Earth, told New Nutrition Business
at the time.
“Flat Earth filled an area where we just
didn’t have product and the health and wellness
portion of the market was consistently growing,”
says Saenz. “The closest thing was Sun Chips,
which are made from whole grains but still in
traditional salty-snack flavours.”
Aiming at the kids market, multipack versions
of the Farmland Cheddar and Flat Earth Apple
Cinnamon Grove flavours were added to the
line in summer 2007. With a suggested retail
price of $3.49 (€2.40), each multipack contains
five single-serve bags. Marketing support for
the extension included a back-to-school-themed
national coupon effort, a sampling programme
and online couponing at the brand’s dedicated
website, www.FlatEarth.com. Visitors to the site
were able to able to register and download a
coupon that entitled them to a free 6oz bag of
Flat Earth chips.
Female shoppers were the keenest purchasers,
generally consuming the chips themselves. “We
anticipated that the shopper would skew that
way but we were surprised how much Flat Earth
is something that women enjoy for themselves,”
said Saenz.
SALES DIP SPURS CHANGES
But there was trouble brewing with Flat Earth
even as its growth rocketed. In 2008 sales slipped
back and Frito-Lay relatively quickly realized
that at least a couple of things weren’t right.
First, the fruit-based flavours didn’t catch
on with consumers; only the vegetable-based
varieties did. “Fruit crisps had a strong following,
but it was narrow,” Frito-Lay spokesperson Julia
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Healthy snacking
Saliba told NNB in 2009. “Their appeal wasn’t
as broad as with veggies, which were really
compelling. Women engaged with them.”
Frito-Lay added a new, fourth vegetable-
based flavour: Spicy Salsa, which includes
red-pepper bits that are baked into the chips.
The “innovative technology” for baking spices
or dried vegetables into each crisp, Frito-Lay
said, “delivers great flavor without increasing fat
content”.
Second, Frito-Lay realized that the original
packaging for Flat Earth had done the brand a
disservice. The ingredients that provided the key
appeal for the product – vegetables – had been
marginalized in the design. Vegetables resided on
the visual fringes of the packaging while typical
images of chips occupied the centre. “The
vegetables got lost on the shelves,” Saliba said.
The new designs put “vegetables front and
center” on Flat Earth packages. These ‘hero’
vegetables on the new package designs were
based on feedback from women. The company’s
release said that the new designs “help women
more easily identify products in the aisle and
better illustrate the product they will find when
they open a bag”.
As the chart shows, the new approach seems
to have done nothing to arrest the decline of
the brand. What can’t have helped is that a $30
million (€24 million) brand is nothing to write
home about for the executives of Frito-Lay, the
world’s biggest manufacturer of salty snacks with
annual sales of $10 billion (€7 billion) and more
than fifteen $100 million brands in its portfolio.
Industry sources speculate that the failure of
Flat Earth to rapidly become a $100 million
success meant that executives lost patience with
it and brand support was quickly and quietly
downgraded, prompting the decline reflected in
the chart.
COMMENT
While smaller companies would accept the
presence in their portfolio of a product whose
primary appeal is to the (large) niche of lifestyle
consumers and use that as the basis for creating
www.new-nutrition.com

a long-term growth strategy for the brand –
playing in the lifestyle niche and investing in
decade-long, slow brand growth – such an
approach doesn’t fit with the mass-market profile
of the Frito-Lay business.
This is a common problem for many
businesses competing in health and wellness –
most boards of directors got their experience at
a time when it was still possible to create mass-
market brands rapidly from a standing start.
Those days are now gone – no-matter what
category you are in. And in health and wellness
in particular one of the core lessons of the past
15 years is that health is about a mass of niches,
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Healthy snacking
reflecting consumers’ widely divergent personal
views about health and wellness and the fact that
making positive healthy choices is the preserve
of the 30% of the population who are most
motivated by health. These niches may provide a
foundation from which to grow brands, but none
can rush into the mass-market – certainly not
as quickly as traditionally mass-market-focused
businesses would wish.
And hence Flat Earth, which has now
disappeared from the market, may have fallen
victim to being the right product launched by the
wrong company more than any other reason.
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Case study 14: Ocean Spray – from bog fruit
to big fruit
Launched back in 1995, Ocean Spray’s
sweetened dried cranberries debuted as a
an eat-from-the-hand snacking item, just
one small element in Ocean Spray’s robust
strategy of delivering its cranberries – of
which it controls 80% of US supply and
around 60% of world supply – as a beverage
and as an ingredient in foods of all kinds,
while at the same time bolstering their health
credentials. It’s a strategy which has helped
make cranberries arguably the world’s most
successful superfruit, with sales in excess of
$1.5 billion (€1 billion) a year.
Dried fruit were not known for their
snacking convenience back then, and Craisins
was America’s first viable snack alternative
to raisins. Since then Craisins has helped
transform the staid world of fruit snacks
and today accounts for a 10.5% share of
By making cranberries convenient to eat, Craisins transformed
the world of fruit snacks and became America’s first alternative
to raisins.
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Healthy snacking
America’s $1.2 billion (€860 million) dried
fruit and fruit snack market; it has taken the
position as the third-biggest fruit snack brand
in the US, after Sun Maid Raisins (although
the gap is closing every year) and General
Mills’ Betty Crocker processed fruit franchise.
For the first 10 years of Craisins’ life,
Ocean Spray faced off-and-on supply
constraints for Craisins, both because it didn’t
invest quickly in vast manufacturing capacity
for the product and because the entire
cranberry-cultivation industry had problems
ramping up acreage fast enough to satisfy
accelerating worldwide demand.
Because its supply problem meant that
it couldn’t initially exploit market demand,
Ocean Spray never advertised the brand. All
that changed in the middle of the decade.
First, Ocean Spray made a huge new
commitment of financial and manufacturing
resources to Craisins by moving to triple
manufacturing capacity for the product to
100 million pounds a year (46 million kilos) by
2009.
Second, beginning late 2006, Ocean Spray
began to advertise Craisins with a TV ad
featuring cranberry growers Henry and Justin
– the staples of its advertising campaign –
standing in their cranberry bog, persuading a
little girl that Craisins are the sweetest way to
consume cranberries.
The result was a massive jump in sales in
2006, followed by steady double-digit annual
growth ever since, with not even America’s
severe economic downturn halting progress –
growth continued at 16% in 2008 and 12.5%
in 2009. A 6oz/170g pack of Craisins sells for
about $2.99 (€2.30) per pack, equivalent to a
healthy $17.60 (€13.50) per kilo.
Outside the US the popularity of Craisins
has been rising as well and while Ocean Spray
doesn’t disclose figures, industry estimates of
www.new-nutrition.com

Craisins sales in Canada, the UK, Australia
and elsewhere suggest that the Craisins brand
is at least as big internationally as it is in the
US. Demand for dried cranberries as an
ingredient in other foods also about equals
consumer demand for Craisins-branded
products.
About two years ago, Ocean Spray finally
reached its desired capacity to produce
Craisins. “We’ve invested billions of dollars in
that capacity and adding production lines for
BOX 14: OCEAN SPRAY CRAISINS ADVERT
Voiceover:
Man 1 (on lefthand side):
We asked my niece if she agrees Ocean Spray Craisins sweet and dry cranberries are sweet.
(Silence)
Man 2 (on righthand side):
We will take that as a yes.
Craisins – the sweetest way to eat a cranberry.
116
Healthy snacking
the product, and that has allowed us to take
the governors off the things we can do for
growth” with new products, package sizes and
other ways to expand the brand, said Brian
Gormley, senior marketing manager of the
domestic foods business for Ocean Spray.
So, earlier this year, Ocean Spray
re-launched cherry-flavoured Craisins and
added pomegranate- and blueberry-flavoured
Craisins. To attain those flavours, Ocean
Spray extracts much of the natural juice from
www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

the dried cranberries and then infuses them Gormley said.

with sugar and, respectively, each of the other
juices.
“That allows us to capture consumers who
weren’t as keen on the original [cranberry]
flavour of Craisins, our flagship product,”
Ocean Spray also began introducing new
package sizes to expand the distribution
footprint of Craisins into venues such as club
stores.

BOX 15: GOOD MERCHANDISING BOOSTS CRAISINS SALES

A key part of Craisins’ success has been effective merchandising and related close-to-shelf communications.
In this particular example:

• A sweepstakes was developed for a chance to win $50,000 dollars in a shootout.

• The programme was promoted via in-store POS, shippers, circulars and in-store radio.
• Trial occurred at select NY Liberty games. Fans were given sample packs of Craisins.
• The programme was executed in 192 Shoprite supermarkets in the New York market.
• Craisins increased sales during the three month period 5% nationally and 33% locally.

117 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

CHART 14: US SALES OF OCEAN SPRAY CRAISINS 2004-2010

TOTAL US supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandise outlets (excluding Walmart)

$86.129
90 (€61.830)
$78.202
80 (€56.139)
$69.504
70 (€49.893)
$59.734
(€42.879)
60
$49.846
$ (€35.781)
50
millions

40 $34.400
$30.600
(€24.694)
(€21.966)
30

20

10

0
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 52 Weeks
Ending
Source: Infoscan Reviews, SymphonyIRI Group Aug 8, 2010

118 www.new-nutrition.com

Case study 15: Berries – convenience,
indulgence and “natural functionality” drive
a super-premium success story
What is it that drives consumers, even in a
zero-growth economy, to pay a super-premium
price for berries – in fact a 90% premium over
the next-highest-priced category? It comes down
to six factors – including convenience, smart
merchandising and science. But these factors
aren’t exclusive to berries – they’re also key in
packaged food categories, making the story of
berries’ success a must-read for anyone wanting to
market “naturally functional” benefits.
Imagine you launched a product with health-
plus-convenience benefits that grew from nothing
to become the most valuable in its category. And
imagine that you achieved this despite being in a
category which has historically been price- and
volume-driven, despite being the most expensive
item in your category and despite not using any
advertising – or even any health claim, relying
instead on the power of “natural functionality”
to create sales. You would probably be pleased
with that result (and more importantly, so would
your boss).
119
Healthy snacking
This is, of course, the story of berries. And it’s
a story from which every packaged food category
can learn something valuable.
BERRIES THE MOST VALUABLE
SEGMENT
In the US and the UK berries – naturally
healthy, ultra-convenient snackfoods – have
achieved the impossible and overtaken the
traditional mass-market fruits to become the
single most valuable segment of the fruit market,
even though volumes are still low (see Charts 15
and 16). In the UK in 2011 berries account for
a mere 5.4% of fruit market volume (measured
in tonnes) – but an impressive 18.4% of market
value. However, it’s important to note that this
does not mean that berries are mass-market – far
from it. The low volumes show that they are still
in the “health conscious” niche, even though it is
a “big niche”.
And while it’s blueberries that have caught
www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

the headlines, they are not the main reason for
this phenomenal success. Blueberries account for
around 20% of the US and UK berry markets,
as the box shows.
To illustrate how fashions change, blackberries
were once the most-consumed berry in the UK
after strawberries. Until as recently as the 1970s
schools in rural areas took a holiday in the berry
season to allow children to harvest them from
the wild.
And while these two markets may be in the
lead, the berry phenomenon is not confined
to them. In mainland Europe berries have
always been highly seasonal, available for only
a few months of the year, but now Germany,
the Netherlands and other northern European
countries are steadily moving in the same
direction, according to Professor David Hughes,
Emeritus Professor of Food Marketing at
Imperial College London and a director of
Berry Garden, the UK’s biggest berry company
with £200 million in sales ($326 million/€227
million), and a globally recognised expert in
marketing commodity foods (the professor’s
advice is in such demand internationally that
NNB found that the easiest place to meet him
was at an airport).
The factors that have been important in the
transformation of the fortunes of berries are also
key factors in packaged food categories:
1. VALUE MATTERS MORE THAN
VOLUME
Charts 15 and 16 tell the story – like all the most
successful healthy foods, berries are a high-value,
low-volume business. The data shown is for the
UK, but, says Professor Hughes, the picture is
the same in the US.
We are told from all sides that consumers are
highly price-sensitive, but the success of berries
shows that is not true for all categories. Even in a

CHART 15: HEALTH AND CONVENIENCE ENABLES THE LOWEST VOLUME PRODUCT TO COMMAND
THE HIGHEST VALUE
Value is shown in millions and volumes in thousands of tonnes

£764
£744
8 $1255
$1222
€864
€842 737000
£622
7 £612
$1022 £570
$1005
€704 $937
€693
6 €645

513000
5
£343
4 $564 £306
365000 €388 $503
€346
3
237000 £199
$327
2 192000 €225
151000 145000
134000
1

0
Value Volume Value Volume Value Volume Value Volume Value Volume Value Volume Value Volume Value Volume
Berries Apples Bananas Citrus Grapes Stone fruit Tropical fruit Pears
Source: Kantar, 52 weeks ending June 12th 2011

120 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

zero-growth economy such as the UK people are
willing to pay a super-premium price – in fact
the highest price for any fruit and a healthy 90%
premium over the next-highest-priced category
of fruits.
The reason of course is that what people are
willing to pay for any product is not merely a
simplistic question of price but a question of
perceived value – and a product that delivers
value in many ways.
2. THE COMMUNICATION POWER OF
“NATURALLY FUNCTIONAL”
“One of the strongest parts of berries’ value
proposition is health,” asserts Professor Hughes.
“Consumers have a very strong positive image of
berries in their minds in both the US and UK.
Berries have been riding on the coat-tails of the
health and wellbeing trend.
“Female consumers in particular,” he adds,
“have got the link between wellbeing and berries
in general, but they identify the antioxidant
message in relation to blueberries.
“We’ve found in consumer research that a skin
care benefit has a surprisingly strong association
with blueberries, very specifically. It’s remarkable
because there have been no advertisements
claiming that and no claims on packages. It’s a
message that women have picked up from the
media and it has grown through word of mouth
– a bit like the cranberry story.”
The rise of awareness of the skincare
benefit underscores that it is possible to be very
successful without having any health claim on
your product – or using any kind of specific
claim in marketing – as long as your product has
a “naturally healthy” image that has appeal for
the media.
“The berry companies in the UK together
have funded a PR campaign which has had
genuine success over the years, not because we
are smart but because the media like to write
about berries.”
The appeal of a foodstuff as having natural
health benefits is one that is very strong in
consumers’ minds and is getting stronger. It is
what underlies the success of coconut water,
marketed as nature’s sports drink, propelling
100% sales growth for the leading coconut water
brands in the US and Germany in 2010.
It’s a reality which points manufacturers in

CHART 16: BERRIES – THE SUPER PREMIUM SUCCESS STORY

Health and convenience enables the lowest volume product to command the highest value (prices shown
in average price per tonne). Berries’ average retail price is a 92% premium over the next-highest-priced fruit
category.
£5,701
6 $9369
€6452

4
£2,969
$4879
£2,272
3 €3360
$3734
£1,677 €2571
£1,450 £1,291 £1,372
$2756
2 $2383 $2122 $2255
€1898
€1641 £844 €1461 €1553
$1387
1 €955

0
Berries Apples Bananas Citrus Grapes Stone fruit Tropical fruit Pears

Source: Kantar, 52 weeks ending June 12th 2011

121 www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

the direction of choosing signature ingredients
for their products which can credibly be seen as
naturally connected with a product’s claimed
benefit – even if it’s another ingredient that’s
actually delivering the benefit.
“If you are pushing in the direction people
want to go in, it’s much easier,” observes
Professor Hughes.
3. THE POWER OF “SNACKABILITY”
AND HEALTHY INDULGENCE
Berries are of course the ultimate all-natural
snack food, easy to eat from the hand or scatter
onto breakfast or other dishes. Women in
particular have turned to them as a healthy
snack.
“Berries are well loved,” observes Professor
Hughes. “Adults see them as affordable
treats. Children like them: if you put a bowl
of strawberries out at a children’s birthday
party, they disappear. Women shoppers tell
us in consumer research that children eat the
berries in the car on the way home from the
supermarket and they are all gone before the
family gets home.
“Parents don’t have to persuade children to eat

TABLE 10: US AND UK BERRY SALES TO MAY 2011

UK market retail sales of all berries in the 52 weeks to May 2011 was £764 million ($1.2 billion/€865
million), broken down as follows:
Strawberries £440m/$716m/€498m (57.5% of total)
Raspberries £151m/$246m/€171m (20%)
Blueberries £140m/$228m/€159m (18%)
Blackberries £28m/$46m/€32m (3.5%)

In the US market the total retail value of berries is $3.1bn (€2.2bn) of which:
Strawberries $1.7bn/€1.2bn (55% of total)
Blueberries $700m/€488m (22.5%)
Raspberries $350m/€244m (11%)
Blackberries $210m/€146m (6.5%)

The Good Natured Fruit brand addresses all the six key criteria for success set out in this case study. It is an example of how smart berry
companies have used sound brand strategy to differentiate themselves and drive berries to their current outstanding levels of success.

122 www.new-nutrition.com

berries in the way that they have to be persuaded
to eat other fruits and of course vegetables.”
4. SMART MERCHANDISING
Like all successful brands, getting the right shelf-
space – and the right amount of space – is key to
success.
“The UK and US are far ahead of other
markets in having well-structured product tiering
at retail – a “good, better, best” offer that is
characteristic of more sophisticated grocery.
In the US specifically Driscolls, who are
number one worldwide in berries, have very
sophisticated category management. They
characterise it as “the berry patch” and work
with selected retailers who will give them the
latitude in store to put all the berries in one
place, en masse, to create a blaze of colour
which generates consumer interest.”
In northern Europe berries have traditionally
been strongly seasonal, but Europe is developing
the same way now, accelerated by the entry of
Driscolls into the European market, offering
berries grown in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
5. “LOCALLY GROWN” HAS A ROLE
In the UK strawberries – above all other
berries – benefit from being domestically grown.
“Strawberries are riding the trend of being
locally or regionally produced. Retailers know
that customers like strawberries from the UK
and so they are willing to support domestic
producers,” observes Hughes.
Blueberries, on the other hand, have not
suffered from being primarily imported,
particularly from Poland and Chile, since
123
Healthy snacking
historically there was no UK production.
6. SCIENCE ALSO KEY TO SUCCESS
A significant investment by the main berry
companies in R&D has given birth to new
premium and proprietary varieties of berries,
with better shape, flavour and shelf life, and
extended the season in which berries are
available.
Funding of university research into berries’
health benefits is translating into a steady stream
of “new news” about why berries are healthy
which is not used in marketing but can go
direct from academics to the media. This both
reinforces berries’ healthy image and makes sure
that they stay in the media’s spotlight.
BERRIES OFFER LESSONS FOR ALL
For any company looking to be successful in
health, addressing the factors above is a key
element of creating a successful business.
Even “locally sourced” – the weakest and least
significant of the six – has value if you can
source some or all of your ingredients within
your market and use it to create a point of
difference. Unlike smart merchandising or a
“naturally functional” health benefit it won’t do
much for your sales price or your volume, but
it will be an insurance policy, showing the most
loyal consumers that you share their growing
concerns about local sourcing.
Given the increasing difficulties around using
specific health claims, all food and beverage
marketing is becoming more and more like that
for berries.
www.new-nutrition.com
 Healthy snacking

Apps and social media

strategies in healthy foods
and beverages
Key lessons and case studies
February 2011

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11 www.new-nutrition.com
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This concise 47-page report:

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 Healthy snacking

Consultancy and strategic advice

Data is everywhere, explanation is rare.
We focus on the explanation.
Our exclusive focus on the business of food, beverages, nutrition and health gives us unrivalled
knowledge of our sector globally. Our customers appreciate our ability to explain what is happening
and what it means to them. This is why we are uniquely positioned to deliver significant value through
a range of services including:

Health & Nutrition Trend Analysis: what we do better than anyone else. All year round we monitor
consumer research, supermarket sales data and interview 400 industry executives to give our
customers clear, actionable insights. Then we tailor these to individual companies’ specific areas of
interest. From Australia to America to Europe, businesses use our unrivalled health trend analysis to
inform their strategy and guide the direction of product development. We individually tailor a package
for each company. We make the content as convenient and accessible as possible, using web delivery
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For a taste of our trends analysis, take a look at our annual Ten Key Trends report at www.new-nutrition.
com/10kt2010.asp. Julian Mellentin’s in-person presentations of the Key Trends are popular with
companies around the world. For more information e-mail: allene.bruce@new-nutrition.com

Health & Nutrition Success Factors: our expert focus means that we are able to identify and constantly
refine and evolve – in response to the evolution of markets and regulations – the “Golden Rules” for
success for products with health benefits. Tailored to your category and market, our Success Factors
guides are widely used by many companies. For more information e-mail: allene.bruce@new-nutrition.
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think clearly about how to get the best results, whether for commercializing science, new ingredients or
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explanations of successes and failures across many categories and markets, and much, much more.
Julian Mellentin delivers these in person or long-distance via webinars.

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Case studies: analyses of particular brands and what key lessons can be applied in your business.

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To find out more contact allene.bruce@new-nutrition.com

www.new-nutrition.com

P UB L ICATIONS
Our case studies and reports give you unique insights into the vital
and changing food, beverage and nutrition market.
Apps and social media strategies in healthy foods and beverages
Social media and apps are the fastest-moving, biggest bandwagon in
global marketing and branding – and food and beverage marketers know
they’ve got to get to grips with this new technology. But there are still more
questions than answers about how best to use social media – and how to
avoid the pitfalls. This concise 47-page report outlines seven practical ways
to make social media work for you, based on real life examples.
Ten Key Trends in Food, Nutrition & Health 2011
This is the food and beverage industry’s most important guide to the business
trends in nutrition and health. Companies all over the world already use our
trends analysis to inform their innovation, R&D and marketing strategies.
Whether you are in ingredient supply or consumer foods and beverages, our
annual forecast 10 Key Trends provides unrivalled practical insights.
Smart start-up strategy in healthy food and beverage
If you have an idea for a new food or beverage with health benefits, or
nutrition science that you want to commercialise, how do you successfully
take it to market? Starting up a new business in healthy foods and beverages
is risky; the cost of marketing is always higher than entrepreneurs believe
it is going to be, and the rate of sales growth is always slower. This report
sets out the five elements of successful start-up strategy over 21 pages,
drawing on lessons from 28 key case studies of recent start-ups, both
successful and unsuccessful.
Coconut water: innovation and natural health benefits drive a new
category
From Brazil to America to Europe: coconut water is the fastest-growing
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Using new processing technologies and new brands, start-ups in Germany,
the US and elsewhere are growing coconut water sales and getting premium
prices. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, some of Europe’s biggest brewing families and
even Madonna have invested in the sector.
Innocent Drinks: seven strategy lessons from the setbacks of Europe’s
biggest smoothie maker
Innocent Drinks rocketed from start-up to over $200 million in retail sales
within eight years, creating a new category in Europe – fruit smoothies. But
between 2007 and 2009 its sales plunged by 29% and prices were slashed.
This unique 27-page report sets out the seven strategy lessons that can be
learnt from the experience of Innocent.
Pom Wonderful: how innovation in science, packaging and branding can
create a new superfruit category
Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice is the world’s most distinctive beverage
brand. First launched in 2002 in innovative and eye-catching bottles, its
meteoric rise helped create a category which did not previously exist.This case
study delivers a close-up view of Pom Wonderful’s strategy and positioning
and the lessons that everyone can learn from this extraordinary brand.
Beauty foods and beverages: 7 strategy lessons
Beauty foods and beverages are big in Japan, but in the West few brands have
gone beyond a niche. This unique report sets out the seven strategy lessons
that can be learnt from the experience of Danone Essensis, Nestlé Glowelle
and Borba Skin Balance Water - three case studies which provide the most
clear insights into the risks and opportunities in the “beauty-from-within”
business.
Healthy snacking
20 Key Case Studies in Functional and Health-Enhancing
Beverages 2010
Using 20 Case Studies of brands addressing a range of benefits – energy,
joint health, sports beverages, protein boosting, digestive health, weight
management and heart health – this report looks at why some brands
succeed and why others fail.
Probiotic juice: five key strategy lessons from Europe and the US
Case studies in digestive and immune health
Probiotic juice is one of the biggest untapped innovation opportunities in the
healthy beverage business, worldwide. Drawing on case studies
from Europe and the US, this report sets out sets out the five key lessons that
are essential reading for anyone who wants succeed in probiotic juice.
Failures in Functional Foods & Beverages:
And what they reveal about success
The functional foods market is a complex one. Success with a new product or
ingredient is rare. This unique 98-page report examines failures by functional
brands and ingredients. It sets out the lessons that can be applied by anyone
trying to develop an effective strategy for a brand or trying to commercialise
nutrition science and offers concise strategies for reducing the risk of failure.
Organic and all-natural kids’ snacks and baby foods
Seven Key Case Studies
Health-conscious parents seem committed to continuing to buy healthy food
for their children despite the recession, even as they economise in other areas.
Energy shots: birth of a new premium-priced, high-growth category
Strategies, trends and case studies from the US and UK
Such is the value to consumers of the proposition of a daily dose of energy with
no added sugar that in the US alone this new category has soared to over $350
million in retail sales in less than two years - despite recession and despite
selling at a massive 400% price premium over “mainstream” energy drinks
such as Red Bull!
Trends & Strategies in Weight Management:
Ten Key Case Studies
Our concise analysis shows which brand strategies are most effective and
why, which ingredient strategies are most effective and why and sets out the
key market and consumer trends. Our analysis is illustrated with ten detailed
case studies which cover satiety and fat burning and look at how to use
weight management to revive old brands or create new ones.
Superfruit: strategy for superfruit success
Superfruits are revolutionising the way consumers relate to fruit and fruit-
based products and they’re growing their market fast – from 40%-100% every
year. And yet just a handful of fruits have crossed over from commodity status
to superfruit stardom. This guide provides a checklist for superfruit success.
Probiotics: Successful Strategies from the Global Marketplace
This report is written for anyone trying to develop an effective strategy in the
challenging and fast-changing area of probiotics. It sets out the seven steps to
creating a successful probiotic brand and describes probiotic strategy both in
dairy and emerging new segments such as fruit juice and solid foods.
The Food & Health Marketing Handbook
In a competitive world how do you take your technology to market so that it’s
your product that wins at the point of purchase? This handbook tells you how
to get the best out of the science and the health benefits of your ingredients
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job title CEO/President/Vice-President/Director

Since 1995 New Nutrition Business has proven itself to be the most reliable,
practical & useful source of analysis & insight into the global nutrition business. NEW NUTRITIO
N
Today over 1,000 companies in 42 countries around the world use
BUSINESS
VOLUME 12 NUMBER 6
www.new–nutrition.com
APRIL 2007

Yakult starts its

ISSN 1464-3308

New Nutrition Business as a practical tool to help them do business.

European fight-back
Yakult Honsha, the world’s

Using a wealth of strategy, branding, regulatory and technology case studies based
biggest marketer the assault of Danone Actimel,
of digestive health products, Yakult even
is bringing one managed to maintain market is LGG (Lactobacillus Goldin
of the most successful of leadership in the it licenses & Gorbach), which
its home-market from Valio Dairy of Finland.
brands to Europe in a bid Netherlands until 2005.
to boost flagging Now, even though it LGG
has lost ground to Danone, is the world’s most-resear
sales. Yakult still holds a ched probiotic and
can be found in around 30

on our own primary research, New Nutrition Business will help you: Launched in the Netherland 34% market share – far dairy brands
s in February, higher than in either
Germany (7%) or the UK worldwide.
and likely to be launched (13%).
later in the year in Unfortunately, ViÅt was
Germany too, Bifiene is Campina’s last
a milk drink with attempt at doing anything
the active ingredient Bifidobacteri innovative for
um breve some time and the company
Yakult, delivering a dose of – which has a
at least one billion reputation for conservatis
bacteria per 100ml package. m and a remarkable
self-conÅdence – stood back

• understand innovation in the nutrition business Although plastic bottles

the standard container for
products in Europe, Bifiene
100ml Tetra Pak, as it is
have become
daily-dose dairy
is packaged in a
while the daily-dose sector
It wasn’t until 2005 – almost
Årst launching ViÅt – that
and did nothing
romped ahead.
ten years after
Campina extended
in Japan, where the the brand into a 100g daily
product has been marketed dose. Campina’s

• learn “best practice” for successfully commercialising nutrition science

– albeit under a failure to see the clear signs
different brand name – since of how the
1978. The packs market was evolving have
are sold in threes and retail left ViÅt as a minor
at Albert Heijn, probiotics player in its home
the Netherlands’ biggest market.
supermarket chain, The Netherlands is also
at €2.99 ($3.99) per 3-pack. home to one of
Europe’s most innovative
The Netherlands is an important daily dose products

• identify international new product developments that you can apply in your own business in the history of functional
– it was where the whole
market had its naissance
country
foods in Europe
European daily-dose
in 1994 when Yakult
Much of Danone Actimel’s
Europe relates to its very
“challenges” as a marketing
success in
effective use of
tactic (see
– ActiFruit from Hero, one
biggest juice companies.
a real point of difference
by providing digestive health
of Europe’s
ActiFruit established
in a crowded market
launched its flagship 65ml November 2005 NNB). These benefits from
daily-dose product, challenge the fruit – each 100ml bottle
customer to take Actimel

• monitor key developments in global markets

called simply Yakult. every day for 2 has a 3.3g dose
weeks and to claim their of fruit fibre (pectin) – and
The Dutch daily dose dairy-drink money back if they this is clearly
market don’t feel any difference. communicated on the label:
has grown strongly in recent On average, the “fibre from fruit”.
years and in number of money-back Thus for the many people
2006 was worth, at retail requests is in single – particularly
prices, around €110 women – who
million ($147 million) – a figures while the challenge want digestive health benefits
staggering 800% concept tends to in a convenient format but

• keep up with regulations worldwide growth over 2001 – mostly

extremely aggressive and
of Danone Actimel, which
market in 2000.
driven by the
effective marketing
entered the Dutch
boost sales by millions.
The only Dutch dairy company
in the sector was Campina,
biggest Dutch dairy groups
competing
one of the two
intake of dairy products,
perfect alternative.
want to limit their
ActiFruit provides a

Athough privately-held Swiss-based

and one of the has declined to comment Hero
Despite being first-to-mar world’s biggest dairy companies. on its brand’s
Campina was performanc

• keep pace with market data.

ket in Europe, the also e, industry sources tell NNB
Netherlands is the only country spurred by the introductio that
where Yakult n of Yakult in sales of Actifruit, which
has had any enduring success. 1994 to launch its own probiotic was launched in
Weathering daily dose November 2006, have been
product, called ViÅt. ViÅ going well.
t’s active ingredient

Minute Continued on page 5

Maid lifts its Biggest fish in

The rise and rise
nutritional omega-3:
Robert Orr of Açaí in the US
portfolio
A subscription entitles you to: Page 3
THE JOURNAL
F O R H E A LT H Y
Page 15-16
E AT I N G , F U N C
TIONAL FOODS
Page 25
& NUTRACEUT
IC ALS

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In the fast As food, beverage and foodservice

companies take up the challenge
kids R
NUTRITION
E P O RT
www.kidsnutritionreport.com

evolving kids’ of children’s nutrition, KNR Unilever unveils first

MARCH / APRIL 2007
VOLUME 3 NUMBER 5
ISSN 1744-5450

delivers to you every two months: kids’ brainfood rang

e
nutrition • analysis & insight of their strategies
By Paul Vincent

Unilever has debuted Amaze,

brainfood for kids” in Turkey.

kids aged 5 to 12, the Amaze
of lunchbox snacks and
which have been developed
a brand it
describes as the “first specifically
designed
Aimed at school
range is made up
flavoured milk drinks
by the nutrition
very positive,” Geert van
Director of Nutrition for
Poppel, Ph.D. and
Unilever’s new
Vitality platforms, told Kids
“In less than four weeks,
more than €3 million worth
Nutrition Report.
the brand attained
and mental development of news coverage
programme Unilever

marketplace
in the Turkish media,” van
established in 2000. They Poppel says. “The
represent, the sales channels are proactively
company says, the culmination asking to list the

& tactics
of extensive products which is a good
research by the company early sign.”
into kids’ nutritional
needs.
Amazing Mums; not
But what makes Amaze confusing
amazing? them
• The brand is the first of
its kind. The
products are specifically The marketing campaign
developed to for Amaze, is fully
support children’s mental integrated to cover press
development advertorials, in-
needs. It does not involve

• explanations of trends and the fortification store sampling, TV advertising

and direct

it pays to stay
of existing kids’ products communication with medical
with functional professionals and
ingredients and to our knowledge a website.
there is
no similar product to be ensure the bioavailability “The brand is fundamenta
found anywhere in of nutrients is lly targeting
Europe or the US. increased, an issue which mothers and TV is the main
is increasing in communication
• Amaze is truly science-base medium,” explains van Poppel.

market developments
d: Unilever importance for all companies
says that it conducted a review with ambitions “There are also, however,
of over in the nutrition industry. advertorials,
200 scientific studies on Amaze has also been formulated a website and TV infomercial
nutrition and s to help
mental development in kids to be as mothers understand the
before creating low as possible in ingredients essentials in kids’
Amaze. As a result of this known to be nutrition and how the Amaze
research Amaze harmful when consumed formula would
products have been designed in excess (trans and help them in giving their
to deliver 33% saturated fats, sugar and children a better
sodium) and therefore

informed
of all the key micronutrie conforms to the WHO’s start. The product launch
nts that science dietary guidelines. has generated a
indicates kids need daily Amaze lunchbox nibbles great deal of interest among
for optimum mothers on the

• profiles of key & emerging mental development – such and milk drinks Internet.”
as iron, iodine have been on sale nationwide
and B-vitamins – as well in Turkey since The communications for
as important February, through all the Amaze “are
macronutrients such as protein grocery channels designed to reflect the great
and omega-3 Unilever has access to in the country. science behind the
DHA. They product and the specifically
are priced at €0.38 ($0.51) designed, unique
• Unilever emphasises that and €0.49 ($0.65) formula,” says Poppel, and
it has gone respectively. what he describes

companies & individuals

to great lengths to formulate “The initial consumer response as a “rational voice” is used
Amaze to in TV ads to help
has been mothers understand that
their kids’ nutritional

Yoplait adds Martek Continued on page 3

’s NutriPals wants to make
Omega-3 to Jacky makes
friends with US moms
its kids’ omega-3
yoghurt more palatable

• new product launch data Pages 4-5

for Nordic kids

Kids Nutrition Report is the first

Pages 7-9
Page 6

and only publication worldwide • brand and product profiles

to focus on the highly active
area of children’s nutrition and
child-oriented food products,
strategies, policies and politics.
Every two months we bring
fresh and exclusive news,
trends and analysis of what is
rapidly becoming a key issue
for the food industry.
• analysis of newly-published research into children’s nutrition
and health
• analysis of marketing & retailing developments
Edited by Julian Mellentin, co-author of the best-selling book
The Functional Foods Revolution, and one of the world’s top five experts
on the global nutrition business, Kids Nutrition Report brings to its
readers analysis that will help them make better business decisions.

To order visit: www.kidsnutritionreport.com or email: info@new-nutrition.com

www.new-nutrition.com
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