is a matter of growth potential, according to Cadbury Trebor Allan’s Paul Sullivan. The sugar segment is exploding like Pop Rocks (a popular kid’s confection that bursts inside the mouth). “Categories are harder to define in Canada, but you look at trends in the U.S. over the last five years and sugar has been growing at between eight and nine percent a year, while chocolate sales are flat.”
Plus using sugar offers more to work with in terms of colours and shapes that appeal to the fickle core market of six- to nine-year-olds. Paul Cherrie, vice-president of Concord Confections agrees. “The price of entry used to be that the candy had to taste good. Now the candy has to actually do something.”
Named after the southern Ontario region where it is based, Concord Confections bills itself as the world’s largest manufacturer of gumballs. The company made North American headlines in 1990 when it purchased New York-based Fleer Confections from the financially troubled Marvel Entertainment Group, publisher of Spiderman comics. Fleer accidentally stumbled on the recipe for Dubble Bubble, the world’s first bubble gum, in 1928.
“Until Dubble Bubble we didn’t have a recognizable brand,” admits Cherrie. “We had to scratch and claw our way into the market. We now have a trademark that took generations to build. Dubble Bubble is to bubble gum what Coca Cola is to soft drinks.”
And is that important in a market that caters to the most fickle of all tastes?
Approximately 95 percent of Concord’s market is in the United States. Interactive brands include Candy Blox, stackable sugar bricks with a taste similar to Wonka’s Sweet Tarts. “If you place Candy Blox against Sweet Tarts, a kid is going to go for the Blox because of the play value,” Cherrie says. And not just kids: several years ago, a Chicago architectural firm placed the single largest order for Candy Blox to present a sugar-based model of a building for a client. Sort of a Lego set that should be kept out of the rain.
Another attraction of sugar has been the low-cost approach to marketing. Pez, one of the original interactive candies, has never engaged in marketing since the company first introduced plastic dispensers to sell coloured candy bricks in the 1950s. Pez remains one of the industry’s top sellers. “Sugar candy has been around forever and candy stores have been around forever,” says Sean McCann, president of Sugar Mountain, another candy store chain with outlets in Toronto and Vancouver. “It’s the candy that sells.” Still, there are signs that this too is changing.
An estimated 250 new sugar products appear on store shelves every year. And recipes seem to call for more: more sour, more colourful, more interactive. More than 90 percent of the new entrants will disappear within two years. Novelty candies and candies linked to popular culture will dissolve even faster.
“There’s always a risk with products tied to a movie or other piece of popular culture,” a marketing representative at Topps points out. “But it can deliver a big bang if timed right.” To reduce the risk, manufacturers such as Cadbury Trebor Allan will use licensees for promotional work as opposed to launching new products.
Cadbury Trebor Allan has used hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and basketball great Shaquille O’Neal to promote Mr. Big. More recently, the company used Toronto Raptors star Vince Carter to act as a spokesman for several brands in Canada and the United States, where the company sells approximately 40 percent of its candy.
There are also signs that Canada’s sugar candy industry is taking marketing to the next level, which will include radio and television spots.
Werther’s Original butterscotch drops was one of the first sugar confections to realize the potential of television. “Almost overnight they turned the candy into a huge brand with a big following,” says Sullivan. “Television is the next step. In the U.S. most of the major companies have sugar confectionery advertising on TV.”
And what are Canada’s sugar candymakers likely to push? Suckers are enormous, according to Topps. That category has been redefined by the return of the Chupa Chup.
While kids will continue to drive the sale of sugar candy, the size of the retro market cannot be dismissed, although most candymakers insist it is the by-product of a healthy industry. “We don’t target nostalgia,” Nestlé’s insists.
Concord’s Paul Cherrie argues that as an overarching trend, the retro market will fade, but that should not hurt manufacturers with established brands. “Confectionery really is a category that transcends age barriers. Our core market does not remember what retro is.”
2
The History of Chocolate
“If one swallows a cup of chocolate only three hours after a copious lunch, everything will be perfectly digested and there will still be room for dinner.”
Brillat Savarin
Colourfully wrapped chocolate bars line store candy displays. Ice-cold chocolate milk is stocked in supermarket refrigerators, while higher end chocolatiers such as Laura Secord and Godiva sell eight out of every ten fancy boxes of chocolates in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Mother’s Day.
Chocolate is the world’s favourite flavour. It is also one of the world’s most global food products. Cultivated in the New World and transported to the Old, the chocolate we enjoy today has been influenced by over five centuries of innovation and refinement in many countries, including Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and England—and, to a lesser extent, the United States and even Canada.
Yet the origins of chocolate are planted exclusively in the temperamental roots of the Theobroma cacao. The tree was named in 1753 by Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, who found the Old World’s initial name for the plant, cacao, or chocolate tree, too vulgar. Von Linné preferred instead to respect the tree’s New World roots by combining the Greek theos, or god, with broma, or beverage.1
Over the years, the Old World appears to have won out as the name Theobroma cacao has been simplified to the more manageable “cacao tree.” But the name is the only thing that is simple about this complex tree. To produce its harvest, the cacao tree must be grown in moist and humid climates, no further than twenty degrees longitude on either side of the equator.
The first known use of the cacao bean occurred in the fourth century, immediately south of present-day Mexico, amid the inspiring stone temple cities of what is often referred to as the Mayan empire. The empire can be more accurately described as a group of Mayan states, sharing a similar culture and little else, that stretched from the Yucatán peninsula to the Pacific coast of Guatemala.
The Mayan culture is widely considered to be the greatest civilization of the original cultures. Known as “people of the book,” the Mayans could write of their art and culture, including the use of the valuable cacao bean.
“The bean was so highly valued, that it was used as a form of currency at a fixed market rate,” wrote the New Internationalist in an in-depth feature on the cocoa chain. “You could get a rabbit for ten beans, a slave cost a hundred and a prostitute went from eight to ten according to how they agree.”
The valuable cacao bean was also used by Mayan priests to create a thick spicy chocolate drink known as chocolatl. Cacao was considered to be a symbol of both fertility and prosperity. The “drink of the gods” produced from the bean was used to solemnize sacred rituals and was consumed by Mayan elite, who often contained their chocolate in magnificent pottery cylinders.
As with chocolate today, the Mayans did not have just one drink recipe. Ingredients such
