America's two largest candy companies The Hershey Company and Mars are launching new products aimed at boosting their health image.
Mars is taking its Goodnessknows snack-bar line national after years of testing it in a handful of markets, says AdAge.
Hershey's meanwhile, has begun selling a snack bar under its premium Brookside brand.
The new products combine fruit, nuts and chocolate into a bar form and "appear squarely aimed at successful bar start-up brand Kind,"says the magazine.
The new bars were shown off at this week's Sweets and Snacks Expo in Chicago.
Mars and Hershey's dominate the U.S. confectionery category with about 25% share each, according to Euromonitor International. But the $6.8 billion U.S. snack bar category, is is led by General Mills (24% share), Kellogg Co. (18%) and Clif Bar & Co. (13%), according to Euromonitor.
One of the fastest growing brands is Kind, which has grown its share from 2.8% in 2013 to 4.9% last year, according to Euromonitor.
Mars will begin mass distribution of its Goodnessknows brand in August backed by a new campaign by BBDO that will include TV and digital ads. Mars Chocolate North America declined to reveal the media budget, but Marketing-VP Berta De Pablos-Barbier said spending would resemble other major product launches. "It's a big deal for us," she said.
The tagline, "Try a Little Goodness," alludes to the health credentials of the bars, which Mars says are made without artificial colors, flavors or sweeteners and contain 150 calories each.
Like Kind bars, the Goodnessknows bars includes whole pieces of fruit and nuts. Flavors include cranberry almond, apple almond and peanut and peach and cherry — all layered on a base of dark chocolate. Unlike Kind, the bars are broken into four separate squares.
Ms. De Pablos-Barbier says this "allows you to control your portion."
The bars are not sold in see-through packaging, as Kind bars are. Ms. Berta De Pablos-Barbier said transparent packaging risks exposing the bars to light that could oxidize the bars and change their taste.
Lisa Mann, exec VP-marketing for Kind, fired back that Kind "pioneered transparent packing within the snack bar category more than 10 years ago" because it wanted ingredients "to be the hero of our snacks."
She said "we invested in the development of wrappers early on that allowed us to maintain the textures and tastes people have come to expect — and love — from us, and still use that packaging today."
Hershey's Brookside bars — which are just arriving in shops — also use a transparent wrapper for part of the package. The bars are expected to be supported with a digital ad campaign, according to a spokesman.
Like the Goodnessknows brand, Brookside packaging makes health claims, including being made from real fruit and containing no artificial flavors, while providing a "good source of antioxidant vitamins A,C, E."
