It’s no great surprise that Mondelez has discontinued its Cadbury Fruitier & Nuttier range. The trail mix featured nuts ‘dusted with Cadbury goodness’, alongside sultanas and Dairy Milk buttons, and was another attempt to overcome the new HFSS restrictions around advertising and in-store promotion. And a genuinely more healthy one too, with no UPF ingredients involved.
But it didn’t land with consumers. Was it the £2.50 rsp for a 35g bag? Possibly. On the other hand, both the healthy nuts and unhealthy chocolate are increasingly pricey – although hope springs eternal in the case of cocoa commodities.
But I would argue that while a health-conscious shopper might opt for an own-label trail mix, it’s super-hard leveraging the Cadbury Dairy Milk brand when the chocolate constitutes a lot less than the ‘glass and a half’ in the CDM bar. And like previous attempts at ‘low-sugar’ confectionery that have resoundingly failed – including versions of Crunchie, Double Decker, Fudge and Fry’s Turkish Delight with 75% less sugar and fat, or the Cadbury Dairy Milk 30% Less Sugar bar – it fails at the most basic level. Shoppers want the real thing.
That’s a lesson Coca-Cola learned a long time ago, hence its steadfast refusal to reformulate Red Coke – even as other soft drinks brands have successfully transitioned consumers towards HFSS-compliant, artificially sweetened reformulations.
As Cadbury’s HFSS innovation to date has shown, however, reformulation is harder in food, especially in indulgent categories like chocolate. And it makes you wonder: where does Cadbury go from here when genuine attempts at healthy reformulation fail to deliver sales? It will be hard enough if the government slaps a further tax (in addition to 20% VAT, let’s not forget), on non-HFSS food.
And as we reported this week, the success of ‘sin’ taxes has meant the tax take is much lower than the Treasury forecast when the Soft Drinks Industry Levy was introduced. But the prospect of not just mandatory reporting, but mandatory reduction targets, in health secretary Wes Streeting’s 10 Year Plan, must be giving Mondelez and other less healthy food (LHF) manufacturers sleepless nights.
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