Simply Gum Shifts Focus to Snackable Candy With New Smoothie Bites

With a sudden pandemic-driven shift in consumer shopping habits leading to declining category sales, natural gum and mint maker Simply Gum saw last year as the perfect time to begin testing the extensibility of its brand through expansion into new categories and use occasions. With Smoothie Bites, a candy offering, the brand hopes to begin to establish itself as a confection platform.

Launched last month, the crunchy bites keep to the brand’s mission of creating natural, clean label products, Simply founder and CEO Caron Proschan said. They are made with freeze-dried fruit pieces mixed with skim milk yogurt and containing four grams of natural fruit sugar per serving. The Smoothie Bites are currently sold on the brand’s website and Amazon for $14.99 per three-serving, .75 oz. bag.

Though yogurt addition may lend the bites more of a health halo than other treats, Simply does still refer to the line as a candy product.

Since the brand’s beginnings in 2014, Proschan said her aim was always to create “simple, high quality products that were better for you.” This started with gum that replaced the plastic typically found in “gum base” with sustainable tree sap, followed by an extension into mints, with both products made without artificial colors, flavors or sweeteners. While Simply had been planning to expand into additional confection categories for several years following its mint launch, the dramatic change in shopping behavior during COVID accelerated the feeling of urgency, Proschan said.

With shoppers heading online, impulse buys such as gum and mints have been hit dramatically, Proschan said. Compounding the issue, use cases for these products also were diminished due to mask wearing and fewer social gatherings. The category saw year over year sales declines of about 30% last May as a result, according to Nielsen, and though Proschan said sales are slowly returning, they have yet to hit pre-pandemic levels. This is true even for large brands, with Trident gum owner Mondelez also reporting last week a 16% year-over-year sales decrease in gum and candy sales.

“We did think about how we could adapt to changing consumer tastes and preferences and shopping behaviors,” Proschan said. “COVID made us look at this pipeline of R&D products we had and really think about what is resonating now with people in this environment.”

After consumer research, Proschan and team landed on Smoothie Bites as a way to both cater to what consumers have increasingly reached for throughout the pandemic — snacks — while also expanding the reach of their products into broader use cases beyond freshening breath. The new launch will also coincide with the start of transitioning the company’s brand identity from Simply Gum to just Simply over the next 18 months, VP of marketing Jeannie Kim said.

Proschan said Simply is launching the bites online first as a way to gauge consumer response and get feedback before rolling out additional flavors or launching the product into retail. Simply also wants to ensure that its next products feel “authentic” to consumers, Kim said, and serve as a natural expansion for the brand that consumers will support.

“It’s just really nice to know that, especially within our core consumers, this Simply brand is extendable,” Kim said. “Smoothie Bites is sort of an interesting, unusual product, it’s not out in the market. If those are doing well, we feel fairly confident that we can go into other forms of snacks and candies as well.”

Simply has several better-for-you snackable innovations already in its pipeline, with a new product coming in the next few months, Proschan said.

The company will also continue to invest in innovation in its core business of gum and mints. Its latest launch on this front is a sugar-free peppermint gum, sweetened with xylitol, which was introduced in March. The brand is also making a retail push for these products as in-store shopping ramps up post-pandemic, Proschan said. The gum and mints are currently sold in retailers such as Whole Foods, The Vitamin Shoppe and King Soopers and launched in 350 Target stores in November.

Despite the challenges the company faced during the pandemic, Proschan feels positive about the future and where the Simply brand can now evolve.

“And all of [our products] share our values of transparency and simplicity and quality,” she said. “We do see ourselves really being able to now become this platform in confections and snackable confections.”