One hurdle is the fees that major stores charge food makers to gain shelf space, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Months after GuS launched, Hersh was contacted by Big Geyser, a major beverage distributor in New York that helped get the soda into Whole Foods and Fairway.įood makers may still have to jump through hoops to satisfy retailers. “Now you go to a Wegmans or Food Emporium, you’re going to see our four packs on a four-foot (wide) shelf, and you’re going to go, ‘oh, that’s a brand,’ rather than three little bottles in a sea of soda,” Hersh said.įinding the right distributor can also help small players build scale.

Retailers are now catching on to its appeal and giving it prime placement. GuS contains less sugar than the average soda and is marketed to adults. A year later, single bottles of GuS were lost among other options in the aisles of Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC, which eventually stopped offering the product. Steve Hersh, co-founder of Utmost Brands Inc, started selling the company’s GuS Grown-Up Soda to retailers out of his Subaru in 2003.

“As the world’s largest snacking company, it is our desire to be meeting those needs.”įor the small food players, that makes getting the right placement on shelves critical. The maker of Oreo cookies and Cadbury chocolate acquired Enjoy Life, an allergen-free food company, earlier this year. “We are certainly seeing that there is a pronounced consumer trend toward health and wellness alternatives,” Mondelez International Inc CEO Irene Rosenfeld said in an interview last month. Hershey bought Krave, an upscale jerky company, in March. General Mills bought organic food maker Annie’s Inc, best known for its bunny-shaped macaroni and cheese, for $820 million in October. Major food companies are also waging a counter-offensive, dropping some artificial additives from their well-known brands, creating new products they say are healthier, and acquiring natural or organic food brands that have proven themselves. The number of companies exhibiting at Natural Products Expo West, a popular trade show where many food makers get noticed by buyers for retail chains, has increased 74 percent to 2,768 since 2005, according to New Hope Natural Media, the show’s organizers. To be sure, getting on the shelves of a Target or Kroger isn’t easy, and competition for those spots is increasing.

“The worst thing we could do was put it into a retail format that was not yet ready for it and have it fail.” Unilever Plc bought Talenti last year for an undisclosed sum. “It was really an exercise in discipline and retail mapping,” said Talenti CEO Steve Gill. Once the frozen treat proved its success, Talenti pitched more mainstream chains like Publix Super Markets Inc and Kroger. supermarkets, the company approached natural food and speciality stores like Sprouts Farmers Market Inc, Whole Foods and Fairway Group Holdings Corp. In 2007, when gelato was still a new concept in U.S. Talenti, a gelato maker that uses hormone-free milk and pure cane sugar, employed such a strategy shortly after beginning production in a 1,000 square foot factory in Dallas. “They’re able to really focus on a subset of consumers and subset of retailers, and win in those areas and use that as a platform to grow into mainstream areas,” said Dan Wald, a partner at Boston Consulting Group. The pace of overall share gains is accelerating as small organic and natural food purveyors win more shelf space at mass-market stores. The privately-held Clif Bar & Co gained 1 percentage point during the period, and another small rival, Kind LLC, increased its share by 2.1 points. According to Euromonitor International, giant food companies General Mills Inc and Kellogg Co had market share declines of 0.3 points and 1.9 points, respectively, compared with 2013. sales of snack bars help illustrate the trend. In 2014 alone, they took 0.7 points of share from big manufacturers. sales, or 2 percentage points of share, away from large players since 2009, according to a March report by IRI and the Boston Consulting Group. Overall, small and midsize consumer goods companies have stolen $18 billion in U.S.

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