Snacks represent a huge and diverse market as eating patterns have become less formal. It’s clear that three traditional meal occasions have transformed into larger numbers of smaller meals or grazing occasions throughout the day. Now consider demand for physical and mental energy boosts through the day as consumers return to increasingly busy lifestyles. Connect the dots and this leads to growing demands for snacks with energizing properties.
Although popular, this is one trend that takes a little more time to track and understand. Within the large and diverse snacks market, the use of specific “energy” claims remains relatively limited. In fact that term appeared in just more than 1% of all global snack launches recorded by Innova Market Insights in 2020. In the highly developed US market, energy snack introductions only represented a modest 2% of all those items introduced in 2020. The majority of launches in the US were in just two subcategories—snack mixes and fruit-based snacks—and these accounted for a combined 75% of new product development.