‘I Didn’t Start Out Wanting To Reinvent JELL-O’: A Bite With Oddball Founder Sophia Cheng

Jiggly fruit-based snacks in the U.S. have long been dominated by one Kraft Heinz brand. Oddball recently launched into Sprouts Farmers Market locations as an insurgent to the throne long held by JELL-O.

Oddball is attempting to bring a new face to the jelly fruit snack category with clean-label, zero-sugar varieties (Grapefruit, Mango, Grape and Double Berry). The sweet snack uses agar and locust bean gum in place of gelatin, making it vegan-friendly.

Founder and CEO Sophia Cheng sat down with Nosh to talk about her years-long road to formulation, how she is trying to reshape how U.S. consumers approach sweet snacks and why jelly is having a moment.

Gelatin snacks are not a packaged food category with a lot of innovation or competition in the U.S. outside of JELL-O. Why go after this relatively untouched corner of sweet snacks?

I didn’t start out wanting to reinvent JELL-O. I wasn’t trying to start something new. The truth is, I really enjoy junk food. I eat a lot of junk food: fast food, chips, candy and ice cream bars. Once I got to a certain age, I realized I was tired all the time. My body was not behaving in the way that I would expect it to behave. And I realized I needed to change the way I eat.

If I’m not eating Cheez-Its or Doritos, which I know are bad for me, my other options are protein bars pretending to be cookies or protein shakes pretending to be milkshakes. I felt like I was being “catfished” by my food.

I grew up in Singapore and Hong Kong. In Asia, we drink bone broth every night, not because it’s a fad but because it’s good for you. Our snacks and desserts are mostly fruits. They’re minimally processed and based on real food.

Taking that real food approach, how did you envision Oddball differentiating from the jelly-based snack category behemoth?

Our first product line is a fruit jelly product, and it is a product type that has been forgotten for such a long time. In the beginning, it was about understanding if the texture was right. Was the flavor right? Is the core messaging of the product resonating with people?

When we were selling them at farmers’ markets, people were attracted to the idea of having a clean, fruit-based snack that’s not a candy and not filled with sugar.

The food system is built for ultraprocessed food that can last on the shelf for many years. It is simple to say no to ultraprocessing or no to sugar, but whenever you deviate from that, which is what we’re doing, you’re bending the system. When you bend the system, it just makes everything harder.

Despite Oddball officially “launching” this month, you have been building toward this for over two years. Explain why Oddball has been a long-term passion project for you.

Different brands and founders have different definitions of “launch.” For Oddball, I was in an always-be-launching mindset. This meant that if I had something that could be tested in the market in some small way, I was going to do it. I was doing this on the side of my full-time job as strategy director at Estée Lauder. In the beginning, I had some products I had made in a [commissary] kitchen and was selling them at farmers’ markets and bodegas as a test.

What happened later was a buyer from Sprouts saw it at Expo [West] and wanted to take it nationally. So it took us a while to get to a point where we were ready to do a nationwide launch. For a product like ours, it’s not easy. There is no machine to make Oddball, so it was a long process of R&D and commercializing, scaling and building a team to get to the point of a true launch.

What are some of the unique challenges you encountered while scaling Oddball?

Oddball is not one of those products that can be made in the kitchen. It’s truly one of those products that’s very finicky and very sciency. You need someone with a background in the science of gums. There’s just not a lot of those people to do that.

The texture was really important. I always say this is not a better-for-you jelly, it’s what jelly should have been from the very beginning. Nailing the texture without using ingredients like gelatin and carrageenan was a very challenging process. We were also focused on taking things out – like high-fructose corn syrup, added sugars, preservatives, dyes, etc – versus putting things in. That process was really difficult. As simple as [Oddball] might seem, we needed to be able to reproduce it at scale commercially.

Where do you see Oddball resonating with consumers? How are you planning to capture that intended audience?

We are a family snack brand. A lot of the new snack brands launching target a certain age group, like millennials, for example. For us, it’s about having a product that can be enjoyed by all ages. I always say: No teeth to no teeth, meaning if you’re zero years old to 100 you will eat this.

Oddball was built and inspired by Asian principles of eating. It’s subtle and portion-controlled. It’s about eating fruits as a dessert or snack. That’s what we are trying to encourage. One of the reasons why we chose jelly as a category is that it’s one of the most versatile foods in the world. Personally, I think it’s incredibly underrated. There’s a reason why they serve JELL-O in a hospital…. because whatever operation you’re getting, whatever sickness you have, you can digest JELL-O because it’s very gentle on your gut.

I wanted this to be a truly accessible product. We don’t just want to be in premium stores. This is a premium product available in mass [retailers]. It’s supposed to be accessible to whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever your diet and whatever age group.

Between popular jelly cakes, jelly sandals and jelly makeup, there is this jelly trend that’s coming up. Culturally, jelly is cool, it’s weird, it’s relevant. When we first started this, there wasn’t konjac pouches or powders. Now, there’s a bunch in all these different formats. There’s even hangover jellies. I would say our format is the hardest to do, but we didn’t just stumble into it.