Eat the Change Aims at Kids with Cosmic Carrot Chews

After changing people’s perceptions of tea and kids juice drinks with Honest Tea and burgers with Beyond Meat, celebrated entrepreneur Seth Goldman is now taking on kids snacks, announcing today that his latest company, Eat the Change, is launching Cosmic Carrot Chews, a line of plant-based snacks aimed at younger consumers.

Made primarily of dehydrated carrots, the allergen-friendly, organic chews are designed to serve as a better-for-you alternative to traditional gummy fruit snacks, a category Goldman said was ripe for change.

“It’s one of the biggest fails, the biggest, most inappropriately named categories there is, ‘fruit snacks,’” he said. “They’re called fruit snacks, and they may have fruit flavoring, but there’s no fruit. So we were, ‘well, wait a minute, if we’re giving a snack to kids that has that same chewy texture, but is actually made with real food, made with carrots, then I’d say that can be a really big idea.’”

Available in three flavors, Sour Cherry Berry Blast Off, Orange Mango Moonbeam, and Apple Cinnamon Asteroid, each pack of chews contains 60 calories. A five count box of Chews will retail for $4.99 with initial retail partners including Whole Foods’ Mid-Atlantic region, MOM’s Organic Market, Erewhon, and Hy-Vee, for a total of about 700 retail doors.

The gummy snack category has seen sugar reduction take hold through several different brands recently, including Smart Sweets, a low sugar chews brand that was purchased by TPG Growth in 2020 for $360 million. Lily’s, recently purchased by Hershey’s in 2020, has also launched a line of low-sugar gummies. Meanwhile upstart brand Soley has launched its own take on produce-enhanced fruit gummies, which have only two to three ingredients and no added sugar or flavors.

Goldman said sugar reduction wasn’t the only goal behind the new Cosmic Carrots, however, calling that particular aspect “slightly better.”

“But slightly better (was) an evolutionary dead end, at least from a nutritional perspective,” he said. “The healthiest fruit snack is still not going to have the kind of nutrients you’re going to get out of a carrot.”

The chews are Eat the Change’s second product line, following its Mushroom Jerky which launched in late 2020. He said the mushroom jerky in many chains is already the top-selling plant-based jerky, with a recent order to go into Publix chain-wide.

Goldman’s co-founder, chef Spike Mendelsohn, said in a release that he developed the snack while trying to develop a carrot chip instead. After being sent the wrong type of carrots for the chips, Mendelssohn said he tried instead dehydrating them, finding the end product had a more chewy texture. The recipe for the Chews ultimately evolved to include cooking the carrots and then marinating them in organic fruit juice and natural flavors.

Dehydrating the carrots allows for more nutrient density, with each pack containing an entire serving of vegetables. The vegetable was selected as the base of the gummies not only for their chewy texture and sweeter taste profile, the brand said, but also because they require only 23 gallons of water to produce one pound, versus soybeans which require 257 gallons per pound.

The launch marks Goldman’s return to children’s products after his company, Honest Tea, in 2007 launched a line of kids juice boxes that contained less juice and sugar. Answering questions on LinkedIn about the nutritional value of Carrot Chews and why parents shouldn’t simply encourage children to just eat raw carrots, Goldman compared the launch to his development of the children’s beverage line — arguing that the snacks were an opportunity to make change.

“When I was building Honest Tea, our most effective innovation was Honest Kids,” Goldman wrote in a comment on LinkedIn. “In our first year we sold over 200 million units, removing more than one billion calories from the American diet, and helping kids get acclimated to a less sweet taste. You can argue water would have been healthier, or that they shouldn’t have been eating fast food at all, but that mindset misses the opportunity to meet consumers/parents where they are.”

Goldman said he’s spending about 70% of his professional time with Eat the Change, with the other 30% split between restaurant line PLNT Burger and Beyond Meat, where he continues to serve as chairman of the board. Eat the Change is something of a return for some of his Honest Tea team, as well, with veteran sales leaders like Melanie Knitzer, Kelly Cardamone, and Richard Tidrow joining Goldman.

There are plans to eventually expand beyond carrots. When asked why he hadn’t simply gone with the mushroom jerky as a kid’s product, however, Goldman laughed.

“You’ve got to know your customer,” he said.