• 🍗 WILDE Brands Raises $20 Million
• 🆕 Gopuff Introduces DTC Platform for CPGs
• 🧑‍⚖️ Perfect Day Sued By Co-Man
• 💲 Fly By Jing Lowers Price, Launches At Walmart

Sure, snacks are a huge part of any kid’s daily caloric intake. But consumers of all ages reach for snacks, although consumption habits change at different life stages and in different locations.

According to data presented in Circana’s “The Snack Journey: Where We Are And Where We’re Going” webinar last week, on a generational-basis, Gen Alpha (born after 2013), Gen Z and Gen X are consuming the most snacks, especially away-from-home.

Where Are Those Dollars Going?

• Kids - consumers 18 years and younger - tend to snack about five times per day. But the real eye-catcher is that there’s been a 22% increase in annual consumption occurring away-from-home — mostly in school — between 2023 and 2022. 
• Gen Z -18 to 25 years old - is starting to tamp down in-between meals as they enter adulthood, but are still driving the snack trend through on-the-go. 
• Additionally, more of those occasions are happening in foodservice, with dollar sales up 12.4% versus a year ago.

Even though Millennial snack consumption is lower than Gen Z, that age group spends the most on snacks in retail. 

• Dollar sales were up 8.6% compared to a year ago, the highest among all cohorts in retail snack purchases. 
• Despite snacking less, Millennials are more likely to follow established routines, and have favorite snacks, leading brands to market their direction to engender repeat purchases.

Meanwhile, Gen X is ramping up its snacking consumption; those dollars appear to be shifting from grocery to c-stores and dollar stores where pricing and convenience are spurring purchases.

Category Watch: What’s Up? What’s Down?

Although not quite a snack, specialty coffee was highlighted as a key driver in away-from-home consumption across all demographics. Savory (salty snacks, chips, bars) and sweet offerings (chocolate, cookies, frozen treats) are also continuing to show strength in consumer preferences. The trend toward indulgence-oriented treats, which started during the COVID era, has shown no signs of weakening.

Better-for-you snacks are continuing on the downward trend they began sinking into around 2020. But, Circana’s prediction models expect BFY snacks to bottom out in the next year and potentially start to show a resurgence thereafter.

Go Deeper: Read more on Nosh about how snacks are changing the game in 2024.

Nashville, Tenn.-based WILDE Brands has closed a star-studded $20 million funding round. The round was led by Karp Reilly and saw participation from Jack Harlow, Machine Gun Kelly, The Family Fund and Grey Space Group, among others. Here’s what we know so far:

• Founded in 2017, WILDE sells a 6-SKU line protein chips made from chicken breast, egg whites and bone broth with flavors ranging from Chicken and Waffles to Spicy Queso
• The company opened a new production facility in Winchester, Ky. last February; to-date it has raised about $24 million across multiple rounds. 

Stay tuned for the full story on Nosh.

Rapid retail delivery company Gopuff this week unveiled “Powered by Gopuff,” a new logistics and technology platform enabling CPG brands to fulfill ecommerce orders via their own websites in as little as 15 minutes.

🛒 The first solution under the “Powered” umbrella, Storefronts Powered by Gopuff, is a customizable Shopify theme integrated with Gopuff’s APIs. With it, CPGs can launch their own white-label DTC site in a matter of days.

⏪ For the past six months, the Philadelphia-based company has tested Storefronts with more than 20 CPG brands, including Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever, and Nestlé. Now, Storefronts are available to all current Gopuff partner brands.

⏩ Gopuff plans to expand its Powered capabilities with Fulfillment Powered by Gopuff in Q2. The standalone warehousing and logistics service is intended to help brands integrate and promote instant delivery on their existing DTC site. 

Animal-free dairy company Perfect Day has been sued by Olon, its Italian co-manufacturing partner, for breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, and fraudulent concealment, as reported by AgFunder News. 

📝 The lawsuit, filed in New York, alleges that Perfect Day deceived Olon by secretly planning to shift the production of beta-lactoglobulin (BLG), a whey protein, to cheaper fermentation plants in India. 

🤝 Olon spent six years working alongside Perfect Day to produce BLG via microbial fermentation. The two companies signed a contract under which Olon put more than $86 million into “expanding and tailoring its manufacturing capabilities to Perfect Day’s unique specification,” according to AgFunder. 

🛑 Perfect Day and Olon stopped working together in August 2023 when the former stopped paying its bills; Olon claim it is owed $112 million in unpaid manufacturing fees, unreimbursed CapEx, and raw materials, plus an estimated $32 million in damages from Perfect Day’s alleged fraud. 

⏪ The lawsuit comes after Perfect Day laid off 15% of its workforce in July as it moved to exit its consumer-facing business, The Urgent Company, and focus solely on its B2B ingredient sales and precision fermentation business. 

Yesterday, in celebration of our nation’s most notorious holiday – Tax Day – Fly By Jing dropped the price of its Sichuan Chili Crisp, Chengdu Crunch, and Xtra Spicy Chili Crisp jars to $9.98 in an effort to make its “fire flavors” more accessible to all. 

🆕 Coinciding with the price change, FBJ announced it will rollout to 2,000 Walmart stores nationwide where the product will also sit on shelves for $9.98.

💬 “For a small company, this does not come cheap. We've worked extremely hard over the last 4 years throughout our supply chain to find efficiencies that have allowed us to significantly reduce our costs, which we are passing right along to our customers," said founder and CEO Jing Gao. 

🌶️ The move follows a week of turmoil in the chili crisp category after David Chang’s Momofuku Goods faced backlash for targeting emerging brands in a trademark battle over the alternative term, chili or chile crunch. Momofuku has since backed off from defending the mark.