Snack Foods
Snack Foods
INDUSTRIAL CODES
NAICS: 31-1911 Roasted Nuts and Peanut Butter Manufacturing, 31-1919 Snack Food Manufacturing, not elsewhere classified
SIC: 2068 Salted and Roasted Nuts and Seeds, 2096 Potato Chips and Similar Snacks
NAICS-Based Product Codes: 31-19111, 31-19112, 31-19113, 31-1911W, 31-19191, 31-19194, 31-19197, and 31-1919W
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
The Merriam-Webster's unabridged dictionary, in a 1961 edition, defined a snack as "food served or taken informally usually in small amounts and typically under other circumstances than as a regular meal." The definition was still accurate in the early years of the twenty-first century, but snacking had also taken on the role of meal replacement for many people at particularly busy times. Within the food sector of the economy, including the food service sector, groupings of products had emerged in response to lifestyle changes. Important among these were prepared foods, with ready-to-eat meals at the leading edge, convenience foods capable of rapid preparation, fast foods purchased at franchises or delivered to the home, and snack foods. Within the snack foods category newly emerging lines of products included healthy snacks and meal substitutes.
Changes in lifestyle and in food consumption have been profound enough so that the drive to provide new products that neatly fit new national habits can be found in every major sector of the food industry—meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables, bakery and other grain products, beverages, and even in the fast food industry itself. The principal strategy industry has followed in responding to changes has been to sell ready-to-eat, highly flavored versions of traditional foods in portion packaging, tempting customers to buy items to eat on the spot, without much thought or preparation, and under other circumstances than as a regular meal. Well-known examples include fruit in the form of frozen fruit bars, fruit rolls, yogurt in the form of flavored snack-sized containers, chicken in snackable nuggets, ice cream sold as ice cream bars, hot dogs on a stick, energy drinks in lieu of breakfast, and breakfast bars.
Industrial classification has not kept pace with these changes in food consumption nor is likely to do so. In the United States, Canada, and Mexico the classification system in force since 1997 has been the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Snack foods are sub-segments of the food sectors that produce them. They exist side by side with items usually consumed with meals. Cupcakes and similar snack products are reported as part of the Bakery Products industry. Snack pies are reported with pies and also subordinated to Bakery Products. Highly flavored crackers intended for snack occasions are classified with Cookies and Crackers. Most cookies and crackers are consumed as snacks. Breakfast bars, a rapidly growing snack category, are classified with Breakfast Cereals. Candies are barely visible in national accounts being divided into three separate confectionery industries. One of these is the industry producing chocolate and chocolate products directly from cacao, another which produces much the same products from purchased chocolate, and the third is the non-chocolate confectionery industry. Virtually all candies are consumed as snacks. Hot dogs, one of the principal meat snacks, are reported under Meat Processed from Carcasses, buried under the heading of Sausages and Similar Products.
Snack food as a distinct industry, however, began to appear even under the earlier 1987 Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. There it appeared by name in SIC 2096, called Potato Chips and Similar Snacks. Another industry, SIC 2068, Salted and Roasted Nuts and Seeds was also clearly a snack food category. Under the NAICS dispensation these two industries, although with their names modified, have been combined by the Census Bureau into NAICS 31-191M, Snack Food Manufacturing.
Much of the quantitative discussion in this essay will rely on statistics published about this industry, but the existence of a much larger snacking universe, as it were, will be continuously kept in mind. The size of the larger universe is difficult to determine with precision because snacking is, in its essence, one of the contexts of food consumption not something inherently tied to the food product itself. For example, a mother placing some potato chips on a child's dinner plate, along with a hot dog—and offering a cupcake for dessert—is putting snack foods, as commonly understood, into the context of a formal meal.
In looking at the snack food industry narrowly, its products divide into two large categories: nuts and chips. Nuts represented approximately 22 percent of the total market in 2002; chips held 65 percent of shipments. Other products, including combinations of nuts and grain products, pretzels, and items not specified by kinds accounted for the remaining 13 percent of shipments. Corn chips represented slightly more than half of all chips (53%), with potatoes representing the rest (47%).
The Census Bureau divided nuts into three categories: bulk shipments accounted for 49 percent, canned nuts for 28 percent, and small packaged nut products for 23 percent of the nut category in 2002. The shares of major products are shown in Figure 193. Note that the percentages shown are shares of the total snack food industry, not of their shares within a variety. Nuts sold in bulk were, for example, 10.9 percent of the industry but 49 percent of all nuts.
The nut category includes products usually classified as seeds, such as sunflower, sesame, and pumpkin, while peanuts are the major category under nuts. The largest type of corn chip is the tortilla chip made of corn flour produced by a special method originally invented by the Aztecs of Central America. The miscellaneous categories include popcorn, bacon rinds, hard pretzels, and many other snacks not defined by type.
MARKET
The Broader View
A very rough estimate of the broad universe of all snack foods suggests that in the United States these foods represented a $53 billion industry at the manufacturing level in 2002. This number includes shipments of all wrapped candy, all ice cream, and all frankfurters and wieners; it also includes snack cakes and snack pies reported as such; all doughnuts, cookies, crackers, and pastries; the snack foods industry as defined by the Census Bureau; and that element of breakfast cereals where such things as breakfast bars are carried. This is an approximation in that it undoubtedly includes portions of these products served as parts of meals and ignores categories difficult to discern from the statistics, for instance, energy drinks intended to be meal-substitutes. If we accept this definition, however, it suggests that of the $4.35 per day worth of food shipped in 2002 for every man, woman, and child in the United States, 49 cents (11.3%) represented snack foods or foods generally consumed in a snacking context.
In 1997 this same broad category had total shipments of $44.3 billion and, in that year, represented 10.5 percent of total food shipments. The snack category, broadly defined, increased its share of all food shipments by nearly one percentage point (0.8%) in that five year period. All food shipments grew at a rate of 1.7 percent per year, snack foods 3.2 percent. These are compounded annual rates. Population increase in this same period was 1.3 percent annually, suggesting that the food industry managed to grow at a rate higher than population by concentrating on promoting snack foods alongside other rapidly growing categories, including convenience foods, often delivered in frozen or freeze-dried forms.
Snack Food Narrowly Viewed
The snack food industry was 29 percent of the broad snacking universe in 1997, a $12.7 billion market. By 2002 the industry was 31 percent of the group and was a $16.2 billion market. Of all major categories, this industry had the second-highest annual growth rate in the 1997–2002 period, advancing at the rate of 4.9 percent per year. Ice cream grew more rapidly at 6.2 percent, and doughnuts did quite well too, increasing 4.5 percent per year. As for the competition between nuts and chips, nuts out-performed chips by a small margin, growing 5.3 percent yearly, and chips 4.8 percent.
Data on the snack food manufacturing industry were available, at the time of writing, through 2005, but not down to the product detail. The industry's growth rate was higher between 2002 and 2005, increasing at the rate of 6.9 percent per year. Data for the 2003–2005 period, however, come from the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM), based on partial producer surveys only. The ASM produces somewhat less reliable data than does the survey used to produce the Economic Census, the latter conducted for years ending in 2 and 7. But the Census Bureau uses the results of its Economic Survey to adjust ASM data collection at five-year intervals to keep the two surveys as closely balanced as possible.
A history of shipments by this industry and by all food manufacturing industries is presented in Figure 194. The data are transformed into index values for easier comparison, with shipment data for both sets at 100 for 1997 and changes from 1997 shown as an index thereafter. The total food category includes snack food shipments as well. Actual industry shipments for snack food manufacturing are also presented in Figure 194 in millions of dollars.
The graphic makes it obvious that snack foods, here represented by nuts and chips, is outpacing all food in industry shipments and also at the retail level. These products typically carry a higher margin than foods viewed as commodities, especially for major categories intended to undergo further preparation in the family kitchen.
Factors of Growth
Two major factors underlie growth in snack food consumption in the United States—changes in lifestyle and simple overindulgence.
Lifestyle changes are often characterized by busy lifestyles, longer work hours, and a loosening in family relationships. These factors result in more food consumed in informal settings. Routine, sit-down, family meals are no longer the principal or only context of food consumption for many. Parents have less time to prepare meals or to supervise their children. Survey and demographic data support this prevalent view. In a 2002 study, for example, the Families and Work Institute (FWI) reported that the work hours of dual-earner couples increased from 81 to 91 hours between 1977 and 2002. Federal Census data for the same period show an increase in households headed by a single parent. Such households grew in number from 9 to 17.6 million. In that period all households increased 47 percent, single family households by 100 percent. The USDA's Economic Research Service has assembled data showing that 30 percent of food budgets were spent on eating out in 1965. This percentage increased to 36 percent in 1975, 41 percent in 1985, 46 percent in 1995, and 48 percent in 2005.
Shift in modes of food consumption could account for increased snack consumption and rapid growth of fast food sales. If only a change in the context of eating were involved, this would translate into a decline of more conventional food categories. Such decline is visible but only in narrow categories, particularly in those where more labor is required to turn purchased food products into meals; an example is the declining consumption of purchased flours. These declines, however, are relatively small. They can be traced back to a demand for greater convenience. Much more telling is the fact that people are simply eating more. Many individuals still eat three square meals a day but also consume snack foods and fast foods.
This conclusion rests on actual survey data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that a significant percentage of the population is overweight and obese. Furthermore, trends are for more of the same, not less. In the 1976–1980 period, the CDC's surveys concluded that 47.1 percent of adults were overweight and 15 percent were obese. In the CDC's 2003–2004 survey, the numbers had shifted upward with 66.2 percent of adults being overweight and 32.9 percent obese. During this same period 13.9 percent of children aged two to five years, 18.8 percent aged six to eleven, and 17.4 percent aged twelve to nineteen were overweight, showing 8.9, 12.3, and 12.4 percentage point jumps over the measurements in the earlier, 1976–1980, time period. Excessive food consumption and too little physical activity account for these disturbing trends—disturbing because excessive weight leads to heart conditions and diabetes. CDC data on physical activity indicate that only around half (48%) of the public engages in sports or other activities at recommended levels.
The Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, an element of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), keeps track of per capita consumption of food. Data show increased consumption of food components. Between 1970 and 2004, for instance, calories consumed per capita per day increased from 3,200 to 3,900 kilocalories, a jump of 22 percent. Carbohydrate consumption went up 26, protein consumption 23, and total fat consumption by 30 percent in this period.
In public debates swirling around health issues in the early 2000s the issue of responsibility in the foreground. Are people getting overweight and slipping into obesity because the food industry sells the wrong products and advertises these products seductively? Or should the public itself be blamed? The economic realities of the food industry are that prepared food of all kinds, ranging from simple snacks to complex ready-to-eat meals requiring only microwaving, carry a significantly higher profit margin. These are, therefore, more actively promoted. At the same time the industry has been quick to respond to health concerns. It has rapidly formulated foods with less fat, sugar, and carbohydrate content. It has introduced grain-based foods made of whole grains. It has been promoting these products with prominent advertising. Healthy snacks have found their place in distribution, but retailers report that these represent a new niche market rather than a replacement of traditional snacks. A part of the public is responding, but by no means all. The responsibility remains the buyer's. The food industry's mission is to sell food, not to promote restraint.
KEY PRODUCERS/MANUFACTURERS
Perhaps a fitting introduction to key producers of snack foods is a still popular song written in 1908 by Jack Northworth and set to music by Albert Von Tilzen. This song contains an interesting verse: "Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack, I don't care if I never get back…." Cracker Jacks, of course, was then, and continues to be a brand name. The product, caramel coated popcorn and peanuts, was introduced by F.W. Rueckheim and Brother in 1893 at the World's Columbia Exposition, Chicago's first World Fair. The product got its name in 1896 when one of the brothers, Louis, discovered a way of keeping the individual kernels of this product apart. He offered some of the sweet nuggets to a salesman who exclaimed, "That's crackerjack!"—a nineteenth century way of saying "great," "cool," or "awesome." The company obtained the right to use the phrase as a trade name. Northworth's verse is appropriate because it points at the two leading companies in snack foods. Planters is the undisputed leader in peanuts (and other nuts). Frito-Lay, Inc. is the leading producer of chips and also the current owner of the Cracker Jacks brand.
A rather awesome process of consolidation has characterized the food industry in the twentieth century, and continues into the twenty-first. Planters Peanut Company, founded in 1906, was acquired by Standard Brands Inc. in 1961. Standard Brands merged with Nabisco in 1981. Nabisco became part of Kraft, Inc. in 2000. Kraft itself had been acquired by Philip Morris in 1988; Philip Morris changed its name to Altria, and spun off Kraft as an independent company in 2007. Kraft, Inc. was thus the leading producer of nut snacks as the first decade of the new century was closing. Planters has at least 30 percent of the market according to Chain Store Age as cited in Market Share Reporter 2007. If sales beyond the retail channel are included, the company commands roughly half the total market for nuts.
With $34.4 billion in sales in 2006, Kraft is a leading food company and also a major participant in the narrower category of snack foods. Kraft offers frozen treats, hot dogs, dips, five brands of frozen pizza, three brands of cereal bars, two brands of energy bars, twenty-eight brands of cookies, twenty-three brands of crackers, ice cream cones, two brands of packaged food combinations, two ready-to-eat refrigerated desserts, four brands of snack bars, and four brands of confectionary—in addition to a dominant share in nuts through Planters.
Frito-Lay, Inc. began in two separate parts, each introducing or popularizing a new product. The two companies were the H.W. Lay company in Nashville, Tennessee. Its founder, Herman Lay, sold a regional product that became the potato chip. The other was Highland Park Confectionary, owned by Elmer Doolin. Doolin chanced across some corn chips in a café in San Antonio and bought the recipe from its Mexican owner who wished to go home to Mexico. This product was the Frito. Both operations began in 1932. In 1945 the Frito Company gave rights to H.W. Lay to sell its corn chips in the Southeast. The two companies worked closely together and merged in 1961 to form Frito-Lay. In 1965 Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola Company merged to form PepsiCo, Inc. This company had thus become the nation's dominant producer of both potato and corn chips.
In 2005 Frito-Lay dominated the potato chip category with a market share of 59 percent and the corn chip market with an even more impressive share of 79.5 percent. The company offers 32 brands of chips. Among these are the top four brands on the market; indeed Frito-lay sells eight of the top nine brands, all but the fifth-ranked Mission brand. Frito's product offerings also include a line of popcorn, pork rinds, and a line of nuts and seeds. In the nut category, the company is the third ranking brand in sunflower and pumpkin seeds and is the sixth-ranking brand in nuts overall. In a wider context, including PepsiCo's other holdings, the company also produces cereal and breakfast bars made by Quaker Oats, which the company also acquired, and energy drinks, most notably Gatorade.
Procter & Gamble (P&G), a leader in many of the industries in which it participates, is a distant second in the potato chip market, second behind Frito-Lay. Nonetheless, P&G had the best-selling brand, Pringles, according to Chain Drug Review for 2005. P&G, a $68.2 billion company, is a household cleaning and utilities product supplier with a small role in the food industry. Diamond Foods, Inc., with sales in 2006 of $477 million, is the second ranking producer of nuts and the dominant producer of nuts sold in the shell, a market in which it holds an 88 percent share. The company has been in operation since 1912 and went public in 2005. ConAgra Foods, Inc. is a participant in the snack foods industry. It owns David Seeds, the top ranking supplier of sunflower seeds. ConAgra is also active in other lines of snack food. It owns the Orville Redenbacher and Act II lines of popcorn, and it sells Snack Pack puddings and Slim Jim chewable meat sticks.
Mission Foods Inc., is a participant in corn chip manufacturing and part of Gruma Corporation, the world's dominant producer of the Mexican type corn flour used in tortillas and in corn chips. Gruma owns Mission and Azteca Milling, the flour producer. Mission produces tortillas, tacos, and corn chips. Azteca is the major supplier of flour both for Mission and for Frito-Lay.
The nation's top two pretzel brands are Snyder's and Rold Gold. The first is produced by Snyders of Hanover, located in Hanover, Pennsylvania, a privately-held bakery. Rold Gold is a Frito-Lay brand.
MATERIALS & SUPPLY CHAIN LOGISTICS
The major raw materials inputs of the snack food industry are potatoes, peanuts, and corn. The industry consumes approximately 12 percent of the annual potato crop. Po-tatoes are harvested four times a year and are grown in thirty-one states. Idaho, Washington, and Wisconsin are the top producers.
Peanuts are grown in nine states, and Georgia is the dominant producer, accounting for 46 percent of all peanuts produced. Alabama (12%) and Florida (9%) are the next largest. Of the edible grades of peanuts, roughly 49 percent are sold as peanut butter, 25 percent as shelled snack nuts, 19 percent as part of candy, and 7 percent is sold in the shell in roasted and salted form. Damaged or inferior grades not classified as edible are used for peanut oil production.
The variety of corn utilized to make corn chips is white corn, a relatively small crop. In 2005, according to the National Corn Growers Association, 700,000 acres of white corn were planted against 82 million acres of total corn. The leading states producing this type of corn are Kentucky, Nebraska, Texas, Illinois, and Indiana. White corn is preferred because it has higher specific gravity (weighs more per bushel), is lighter in color, and it exhibits superior performance in processes used to make it into corn flour. That process utilizes cooking corn kernels in a lime solution to remove the thin hull around each kernel.
Despite regional concentration of production in these major inputs to the industry, all of the raw materials are amply available at reasonable prices. Corn prices were rising in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century as a consequence of sharply rising interest in ethanol production. White corn is not the variety used in making grain alcohol, but the general focus on corn, and possible shifts from one to another variety in response to price increases, may in the future affect part of the snack food industry.
Production activities are concentrated in four regions. Most of the production is in California, in the states of the East North Central and Middle Atlantic regions, as well as Texas, Alabama, and Florida.
DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL
If spending on snack food is divided by channel, 57 percent of it takes place in grocery stores. Superstores come next with 16 percent of snack expenditures. Other sellers are warehouse clubs (9%), merchandisers (7%), drug stores and dollar stores (2% each), and convenience stores/ gas outlets (1%). All other channels represent 5 percent of expenditures.
Snack foods, evidently, are sold widely. These are conclusions reached by Progressive Grocer, the magazine citing data from AC Nielsen for a one-year period ending in July 2006. The cited Nielsen data did not show what the company included under the All Other channels. Presumably these channels include vending machines and retail outlets often located in office buildings; the latter are not usually surveyed as part of the convenience store category because they serve a captive clientele. The same report also looked at where consumers purchase candy. The data showed that grocery stores had a considerably smaller but still a leading share of candy sales (32%) and drug stores a much higher share of candy (13%) than they have of snack food (2%).
KEY USERS
Snack foods are consumed by just about everyone. Portions of the population may be dieting, but even that subgroup will purchase snack products specifically designed to help individuals shed weight.
ADJACENT MARKETS
The desire for a snack frequently arises as an urge for stimulus of some sort. These urges tend to arise at two-hour intervals during the day's course. People seem to wish to punctuate their day with something that comes between the ending of one task and the start of another. Some kind of intake seems to serve this purpose, hence the universality of coffee breaks and the communal congregation around the water cooler in offices and factories. Adjacent markets arise from this need or habituation.
For many, coffee or tea serves to mark the "pause that refreshes." That famous slogan, introduced by Coca Cola, also points to soft drinks as another adjacent market. Bottled water is another product category, one that is growing at a rather energetic rate. Adjacent to nuts and chips, the products of the narrowly-viewed snack food industry, are other categories of snacks; these are crackers on the salty end, cakes, cookies, and candies on the sweet side. Some people take sharply-flavored minty candies. Among those promoting a healthier lifestyle, eating fresh fruit is routinely recommended. The dairy industry promotes yogurt.
Chewing gum represents an adjacent market in that it provides a stimulus similar to eating without being a food. As snacking is a common means to distract those wishing to stop smoking from the nicotine craving so, conversely, others view smoking cigarettes as a means to diminish appetite and to sharpen the mind. The health risks associated with smoking are thoroughly documented. Health risks arising from excessive snacking are becoming well known too.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
In the snack food industry, research and development is aimed at new product development to counter the medical assault on the modern diet. The health establishment charges, first and foremost, that people eat too much and do not exercise enough; and once people cut back on intake, the authorities say, the food they eat still has too much fat, sugar, and salt. The food industry's dilemma arises from its need to post continuous growth in earnings, which it best achieves by producing complex prepared foods with high margins. To sell this food it has to attract its clientele by superior taste, most easily achieved by the use of fat, sugar, and/or salt. This situation drives R&D in snack foods as in other branches of the food industry.
The chief thrusts of development are to replace saturated and trans fats with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Saturated fats come from dairy products, red meat, chocolate, and coconuts, which have high levels of hydrogen. Trans fats are similarly high in hydrogen content, but the hydrogen is introduced by artificially hydrogenating vegetable oils to raise their melting points and to retard their spoilage—desirable in production and shelf-life maintenance. Monounsaturated fats come from olives, canola, peanuts and most other nuts, and avocados. Polyunsaturated fats come from corn, cottonseed, safflower, soybeans, and fish oil.
Cholesterol, the fatty complex synthesized by the body for maintaining cell structure and also introduced by foods, is itself insoluble in blood but is carried in the blood stream in vehicles. These vehicles are known as lipoproteins. They are partially soluble in water and carry cholesterol by chemical attachment. Two kinds of lipoproteins carry fat. High-density lipoprotein (HDL) carries cholesterol tightly bound and less of it than the low-density kind (LDL). LDL carries more cholesterol, less tightly bound, and is capable of shedding cholesterol in the arteries. When this happens, the sticky cholesterol can build up and block flow of blood. Hence HDL is colloquially referred to as good cholesterol and LDL as bad cholesterol. The unsaturated fats have a high level of HDL, and the saturated and trans fats have a high level of LDL, the difference related to their hydrogen content and structure.
In replacing one kind of fat with another, product behavior and flavors change. Losses in function and taste require compensatory adjustments. R&D is directed at achieving desirable results but using unsaturated fats. Considerable work is focused on processing the foods and on discovering desirable synthetic and natural flavor-enhancers. Milk-whey is a rich source of proteinaceous, non-fat structures that trigger pleasing taste sensations.
High levels of salt intake are partly associated with high blood pressure. Hypertension, however, is also associated with inadequate minerals balance in the body, thus with levels of potassium, magnesium, and calcium. Fat consumption and stress are also implicated. Achieving a salty taste sensation with minimum amounts of salt and by addition of other spices is part of continuing research interest in the industry.
CURRENT TRENDS
The dominant trend in the snack food industry is the production of healthier snack foods. Important developments include the introduction of highly flavored baked chips with very little or no fat content and low levels of salt. These products appear to be gaining in popularity but their degree of penetration is still low. Low-fat versions of corn and potato chips have been on the market since the mid-1990s, but none has thus far achieved visibility among the top brands. Only a segment of the population appears to be responding to the health appeal.
If the snack category is expanded to include products beyond nuts and chips, a very strong trend is discernible toward the mass marketing of conventional foods in the form of snacks. A leading example of this trend is the granola-style breakfast bar. This category is still only a very small fraction of the breakfast cereals market but exhibits the most rapid growth.
An already well-established trend, but likely to become stronger, is the production of snack foods in individual portion sizes, thus a bar or a small bag intended to be consumed at once versus the bulkier sack or box intended to serve multiple snacking occasions.
TARGET MARKETS & SEGMENTATION
Current trends also define major market segments. The largest segment is that which is made up of snack foods sold in grocery stores, supermarkets, and mass merchandisers in large boxes or bags for consumption at home. Within this broad category are products targeted to the health-conscious. Some of these products are new and quite different—the baked goods are an example. They require a certain adjustment in taste but are winning a following. Others are improved by removing less desirable components; their reformulation is highly publicized, but the products taste pretty much the same as those that they are intended to replace. The last major segment is directed at those people who, for a variety of reasons, wish to have nutritious meal-substitutes which can be consumed on the run.
RELATED ASSOCIATIONS & ORGANIZATIONS
American Institute of Baking International, https://www.aibonline.org/about/index.html
American Peanut Council, http://www.peanutsusa.com
National Corn Growers Association, http://www.ncga.com/03world/main/index.html
The Peanut Institute, http://www.peanut-institute.org
Salt Institute, http://www.saltinstitute.org/4.html
Snack Food Association, http://www.sfa.org
Tortilla Industry Association, http://www.tortilla-info.com
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