Dive Brief:
- Hormel Foods Corp. announced three new product lines during a presentation with investors last week. The company set a goal of making $3 billion in new product sales between 2000 and 2016.
- To carry out this goal, Hormel's corporate innovation team began working with the company's Grocery Products brand team and marketing and R&D departments to create products that would drive Hormel forward in the snacking industry.
- Each of the products were inspired in some way by the on-the-go trend in snack foods.
Dive Insight:
Hormel acquired the Skippy peanut butter brand in 2013, and since, the company has already put out new product lines for the brand. None, however, are quite like Hormel's new Skippy P.B. Bites, which are inspired by candy companies' recent forays into unwrapped bite-sized morsel snacks. In this case, Hormel drew inspiration both internally and externally in the food industry to create its new products.
James Splinter, group vice president of Hormel’s Grocery Products unit, said, "I’ve heard numbers that when the candy industry moved to bites, they’ve seen it to be as high as 25% incremental in terms of their overall category performance. And so that’s an opportunity for us. We think bites are very on-trend, and we hope to capture this proportion and share that."
Another new product from Hormel, Spam Snacks, uses proprietary technology to create dried meat bites in a variety of flavors, all in response to the fast-growing dried meat snacking category. A similar new product, Jennie-O All Natural Turkey Breast Sticks, are four flavors of individually wrapped dried meat sticks.
Protein and portability are two key factors in Hormel's most recent innovations and are direct responses to consumer trends.