Mars is taking a stake in snack maker Kind, signaling just how desperate big food makers are to thrive in an industry where startups are winning.
"I call it buying scared, is what we're kind of seeing in the food industry right now," says Shea Food Consultants President Rick Shea. "Companies have realized that they need to be in some of these faster-growing categories with brands and/or products that are better positioned for the long term."
Mars is already in the category. Back in 2015, the company eagerly announced the national rollout of Goodnessknows, a snack bar featuring four small squares of fruits and nuts sitting atop dark chocolate. That line and a competing one from Hershey, under the Brookside name, pitted the major candy makers directly against Kind in the growing snack bar space.
Since then, Mars has been updating and expanding its Goodnessknows line, but now seems to be doublng down by taking a minority stake in Kind and planning to promote Kind in snack bars and other categories.
Mars declined to comment on the size of the Kind stake and the price it paid. Sales figures for Goodnessknows were not immediately available. But Goodnessknows is a much smaller player than General Mills' Nature Valley, Clif Bar and Kind, the top three snack bar brands with global market shares of 9.3 percent, 7.1 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively, according to Euromonitor International.
Kind has often used field marketing and other smaller spending tactics, such as erecting an outrageously huge mound of faux sugar in Times Square to point out how much added sugar American children take in each year.