The snack bar business is increasing and producers can be prepared with formulas and processes within the changing market. The total snack bar market reached $13.4 billion globally in 2017. North America accounted for more than 57 percent of total global sales with the U.S. market alone accounting for almost 51 percent of the total 2017 snack bar global sales - $6.8 billion.
Diet and health go hand in hand. A balanced diet, along with regular physical activity, goes a long way in maintaining good health and consumers are increasingly considering health while making food purchase decisions. What constitutes healthful food is certainly a matter of debate and the metrics surrounding this topic continue to evolve. In the past, levels of fat, sodium or cholesterol alone sufficed to indicate health credentials of food.
Snacking can be more fun when chocolate is involved. After all, the best part of the snack is the chocolate, right? Chocolate can be the best part if given proper consideration when designing the product. Hitting that sweet spot of taste, texture, appearance, shelf life, price and other attributes is challenging. How do confectioners and snack makers work their magic? How do the chocolate makers know what to make? There is much to uncover in bringing these elements together to commercialize a winning product
Experts define food fraud as deliberate and intentional substitution, addition, misrepresentation of food, or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain that could impact consumer health. This issue has been brought into focus by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), which has released its new benchmarking requirements document empha- sizing the importance of having a food fraud mitigation plan.
One of the topics in mastering the fun- damentals of innovation management is innovation process design. Some variant of a Stages-and-Gates process defined below is typically used in the confectionery industry, particularly for developing and launch- ing new products. Herein, we consider how confectionery might look utilizing more modern practices such as Agile Development and Lean Start-up used in technology and other industries to renew and update a tired and underperforming stages-and- gates development process.