“I think COVID shocked our systems in a lot of ways,” said Wolf, who noted how as consumers spent more time at home, they tended to seek out familiar comfort foods leading to a spike in sales in Mondelēz’s core business of cookies and crackers.
But the tide is shifting towards discovery of new brands and products, she added.
“At the same time… There’s a huge push still in health and wellbeing, in immunity, and how we take care of ourselves not just as individuals but our communities. Going forward, consumers are going to want to explore more. We’ve been cooped up for a couple years and there’s a lot of variety and a lot more exploration we want to do.”
‘One of the huge opportunities that we continue to see is plant-based’
To better tap into emerging snack trends, Mondelēz plunged into the startup space in 2018 with the launch of SnackFutures, its innovation arm that developed new brands in-house (Dirt Kitchen Snacks, CaPao, Millie Gram, NoCoé, and Ruckus and Co) and invested in others (Uplift Food, Torr, and Hu).
“That whole process of creating these brands and building the ecosystem is a totally new group of vendors and partners that the big Mondelēz doesn’t have. It’s different routes to market and different styles of engagement with consumers, and different pathways from our core categories of cookies and crackers,” Wolf told FoodNavigator-USA at the Natural Products Expo West Show in Anaheim, California, last month.
While its in-house brands have stayed small, distributed in very select markets, Wolf noted that as consumers spend less time out of the house, their pursuit of discovery in snacking will accelerate, especially for plant-based snacking options such as Dirt Kitchen Snacks.