Innovation is cheesy
3-min read
One of my favorite innovations in the last year is a riff on Totino’s pizza rolls called Snow Days. Snow Days takes a familiar form – pizza bites – and makes it healthy. It maintains the convenience factor (microwaveable by anyone over 5) and adds in a new permissible factor (it’s organic & gluten free) that brings in health conscious parents whose kids were sneaking Totino’s at the neighbor’s house.
Tasty, convenient, healthy + cheese = genius.
Snow Days couldn’t have launched at a better time. In the category of frozen snacks, General Mills’ Totino’s brand sales rose >18% to hit $442 million in the 52 weeks ending Feb. 2021. Expansion of a big category = big opportunity.
On the surface, we can point to Covid for our over-consumption of cheese-filled comfort foods. I’m not the only one who fell hard for the charcuterie plate during lock down. But it turns out we are a nation increasingly in love with cheese:
Over the past decade, US per capita consumption of cheese has increased by over five pounds.
That’s a lot of cheese.
While most category sales have normalized post Covid, the cheese category remains up +15%. Even in the face of disruptors like alternative dairy, something is going on with cheese.
Let’s zoom out for a second.
Historically, advancements in food technology resulted in products that improved the lives of the working class. It’s interesting to consider how eaters have become exposed to new foods and eating habits over time. Let’s just look at what happened since the pasteurization of milk. There’s no denying Kraft Singles and Lunchables were a boon to the working mom.
It’s been the role of Big Food as high-volume producers to gain critical mass with the middle-class shopper in the last millennium. But now we are in an era of sustainability and nutrient density. It’s a movement away from processed foods and empty calories and towards whole foods and carbon neutrality.
While per capita cheese consumption has been growing steadily over time, today what is driving that growth is not Kraft singles but premium offerings – cheeses you find in the deli case that come from small local dairies that have been around for generations. Many of these dairies are adopting sustainability practices much quicker than their mega-dairy counterparts.
Large industrial dairies are trying to catch up to the smaller guys by imposing sustainability goals. Big companies like Land-o-Lakes and Bel Brands are incenting their dairies to adopt sustainable farming and animal feed production methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet their goals. However, their supply chains remain complex and therefore innovation is slow moving.
Next week I’ll profile a sustainable specialty cheese maker that has seen sales double in the last year. They are a local farmstead that has been in the dairy business for over 100 years.
All my best,
Jennifer
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