Baking & Snack - June 2004 - 49

MARKET UPDATE

Sweet
Revival

Snack cake marketers hope their products will have
the emotional appeal to rejuvenate this sluggish category.
BY SHANE WHITAKER
ealth and nutrition are two
of the hottest buzzwords in
food today. Consumers know
they should be eating healthy
foods, but in the end, they purchase
for convenience and desire indulgence.
Consumers are notorious for saying
one thing, then doing another. Ultimately, consumers accept or reject new
products via the almighty dollar.
In this era of low-carbohydrate
diets and obesity concerns, do snack
cakes have a place in the American
diet? How can snack cake manufacturers market these indulgent treats as
something mothers feel comfortable
adding to their children's lunchboxes?
It may be a paradox, but snack cakes
can find a place in a reasonable diet.
"I think the biggest challenge we
face is making sure the products we
have and the products we're developing are relevant to today's consumers," said Mike Redd, vice-president
of cake marketing with Kansas City,
MO-based Interstate Bakeries Corp.,
whose Hostess brand remains the
second-leading snack cake in the
United States.
To be relevant, he said, snack cakes
have to appeal to those attributes
driving consumers' purchasing decisions, such as convenience, nutrition
and emotions.

PROMISING PROMOTIONS. To
reach consumers on an emotional

level, snack cake manufacturers are
marketing their products in new
and exciting ways. They are tying
their products in with seasons and
holidays and creating exciting contests in which consumers can receive
meaningful prizes.
While a Twinkie is a Twinkie no
matter the season, special offerings such as limited-time Glo Balls
encourage consumers to pick them
up while they can. Snack cakes are
already an impulse category, and
seasonal promotional campaigns add
extra purchasing incentive. Last fall,
IBC started a new seasonally themed
merchandising campaign within its
Hostess brand in an effort to stop declining sales volumes. And it appears
to have worked. Mr. Redd reported to
Baking & Snack in April that Hostess
snack cakes have experienced seven
straight months of positive sales
gains, attributed in part to these special seasonal products.
Back-to-school promotional
campaigns are
always big for
the
company,
according
to
Mr. Redd, but
it decided to
expand its offerings to appeal
to more consumers.
The initial campaign was
tied to Halloween and fea-

tured such products as Glo Balls,
a colorful rendition of its Sno
Balls; Scary Cakes
and other mainstays
such as Ding-Dongs
in special packaging for
the season. Since then
the company created similar
promotions around Christmas,
Valentine's Day and Easter. Currently,
IBC plans promotional tie-ins with
this summer's auto racing season.
Chattanooga, TN-based McKee
Foods Corp., the maker of Little
Debbie snack cakes, offers a similar
promotional product lineup. Altogether, the leading US snack cake
brand features more than 25 different products geared toward the
various seasons and holidays. Little
Debbie's most recent introduction
was Easter Crispy Bars, which are
similar to its Marshmallow Crispy
Bars, except they were made with
pastel blue-, pink- and yellowcolored crispies. In addition to

June 2004 / BAKING & SNACK / 49

Baking & Snack - June 2004

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