Consumers look to snack on something healthy and natural

摘要

How much has the snack landscape changed over the years? In 2002, snack giant Frito-Lay revealed it was looking at new kinds of snacks for the future, including potato chips sprinkled with "good for you" ingredients such as broccoli, carrots, and tomatoes. Whether those potato chip formulations will ever move beyond the company's corporate headquarters remains to be seen, but the pace of change is picking up with Frito-Lay's big move into natural potato chips, tortilla chips, and puffed snacks earlier this year. Want to talk about growth in the snack industry? That would be a short conversation if the topic were limited to the industry's larger markets, such as potato chips, pretzels, corn chips, and tortilla chips. Of the four, only tortilla chips posted a unit volume gain, and a small one at that (1.1 percent), for the 52-week period ended Oct. 4, 2003, according to ACNielsen. The company adds that unit sales of potato chips, pretzels, and corn chips through food, drug, and mass outlets (exceptWal-Mart) actually declined 2.1 percent, 4.5 percent, and 0.5 percent, respectively, over the same period.