Here’s a target group that has permission, even a need, to snack: Kids.
Mums (and 1% of Dads) fret a lot about finding the right kind of snacks to allow into the lunchbox. But after the 15th returned bag of apple slices, they tend to give up and look for something else ‘less bad’ than the dreaded candy bar.
Most Kids don’t care about looks and money but they don’t do ‘brown and shrivelled’ either. So a whole new landscape of reconstituted and reformed fruit snacks has sprung up. The technology has been around for a while, as witnessed by the fact that Kellogg’s Fruit Winders is still on shelf.Quite how it manages to sell anything with a pack like that is beyond me, as it seems to proudly offer neon-coloured chemical fruit substitute.
Other brands on this shelf have very slowly learned that they need to balance the frenetic fun with some sense of naturalness: Another job for matt foil (is there no limit to its talents?)
But the new big beast of this category is Bear. Possibly a clever allusion to nakedness (another popular theme in healthy snackland), the brand avoids the temptation of a cuddly mascot. Instead it offers a thoroughly modern brand mark that seems to resonate with mums. The box (with kid-friendly carry handle) is a high quality, matt-printed carton, and promises ‘1 of your 5 a day’ on the panel where you open it. Inside we find more high quality matt paper (foil-lined) sachets, promising ‘fruity goodness’ and telling Mums how Bear ‘gently bakes’ this stuff in a cave.
They also claim ‘no added nonsense’, which given that cave story might be stretching a point. Then again they stretched the fruit, but in this packaging it becomes an acceptable transformation.