Meet Skip, a friendly sort of kid who'll soon be frequenting your local supermarket.
He's approachable, perhaps a little mischievous, but clearly one cool dude, ready for action on his peanut-patterned surfboard. His goal is an ambitious one: He's joining such supermarket notables as Kellogg's Frosted Flakes' Tony the Tiger and Chester Cheetah and hopes to capture kids' attention and, more important, their parents' grocery dollars.
Brought to you by Skippy Peanut Butter, Skip will start to appear nationally at the end of March on boxes of Skippy's newest product, Skippy Squeeze Stix. This latest food-in-a-tube snack is certainly important for Skippy, the second-best-selling peanut butter on the market. It also lands at the intersection of three important trends for contemporary food products aimed at children: cartoon imagery; food as fun; and portability, which is what marketers call the ability to eat a food anywhere, any time. Skippy is not alone at this ever-more-crowded intersection, but it's the first to go this far with peanut butter.
The trend toward making food "fun" for children can be seen throughout the aisles of any well-stocked supermarket. H.J. Heinz Co., which devised its venerable tomato ketchup back in 1876, today produces fun with green and purple ketchup. That's an invention that "adults found gross, but kids came up with it -- it wasn't our idea," said Robin Teets, spokesman for Heinz. The company listened: "Per capita, kids are the biggest consumers of ketchup," he said. Over in the frozen-food aisle, there are Funky Fries, blue french fries created by the Ore-Ida division of Heinz. Think of the possible color combinations at dinner as kids aim those flexible EZ Squirt bottles at the Kool Blue spuds on the plate.
Then over in the refrigerated section are Oscar Mayer Lunchables, which in 1988 became the first entrant into the "lunch kit" category. The early boxed lunches were fun -- and, yes, portable -- and they were just mini-size slices of ham and cheese. But now some offer squeezable yogurt or a tortilla, making food even more entertaining by letting the kids squirt their lunch or make a wrap sandwich. "Kids like to be in control," says Sarah Delea of Oscar Mayer, a part of Kraft Foods. "And they love to build things."
It's no secret why food manufacturers are courting children, seeking their opinions and listening to their ideas in focus groups. Kids are estimated to spend as much as $35 billion directly, of which at least $10 billion is on food and drink. Overall, kids-marketing experts estimate that children directly influence as much as $300 billion in family purchases, helping parents decide which brands of food and clothing to buy. Indirectly, they influence another $200 billion -- or more -- when families decide which kind of car to drive or vacation to take.
That's why Skip's story is not just about peanuts.
Pushing peanut butter from the flat plastic squeeze tube may be fun for kids -- it's also something they can do anywhere with no need for knife, fork, spoon or bread. And that addresses that buzzword, portability.
"Portability is huge today, as much a function of the fact that people are on the go and don't have time," said Paul Kurnit, head of the marketing consulting firm KidShop. With the exception of dinner, "the classic mealtime occasion -- where people sit down and have a meal -- is gone," he said. "More often than not, people take their meals with them." And kids, in particular, eat as many as six meals a day, making portable snacks a perfect opportunity for food manufacturers.
That helps explain why Lunchables has been considered such a success and why a host of other on-the-go products has followed suit, such as General Mills' Milk 'n Cereal Bars, where Cocoa Puffs and Honey Nut Cheerios and other cereals are combined with milk to make the bar the nutritional equivalent of a bowl of cereal and milk.
