Earlier this year, global snack giant Mondelez made a series of unsolicited offers to acquire Hershey, which the candy company turned down. If the company can’t have Hershey, though, what will it do? It announced plans today to expand its own chocolate offerings in both its upmarket and downmarket lines.
Mondelez, the name of what used to be the snack portion of Kraft Foods, wanted to expand its candy business in the United States by buying the fifth-largest candy company. It even offered to make Hershey, PA its headquarters and rename the entire company Hershey. Yet Hershey’s shareholders still weren’t interested, so what Mondelez has to do now is make more candy money in the U.S. using the products that it already has.
Even though its subsidiary Nabisco probably hasn’t run out of exotic Oreo flavor ideas yet, the company is now reversing the idea and flavoring other things like Oreos. Specifically, its own candy bars: it announced plans to bring Milka chocolate bars with Oreo filling to this country.
It’s also aiming at the market of higher-end chocolate, but not so high-end that you can’t buy it in a grocery store. The company plans to expand Green & Black’s, its brand of organic chocolate bars.
Mondelez also has an interesting goal of making $1 billion in e-commerce snack sales in the year 2020. What do e-commerce snack sales look like, and will it become cheap and convenient to order, say, cases of cookies on brand websites?
Mondelez outlines U.S. growth plans after Hershey snub [Reuters]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist