With an increasing awareness among consumers on healthy eating, snack bars have become immensely popular, replacing chocolates, cakes and biscuits as the go-to snacks.
Snack bar manufacturers are introducing the health aspect into their products via protein and fiber content. The category fared well despite the economic recession as they are considered an affordable comfort food, according to an exclusive report by research firm Mordor Intelligence.
The report, “Global Snack Bar Market: Growth, Trends and Forecasts (2018 – 2023),” explains snack bars brands have been responsive to consumer trends such as demand for nutritious snacks containing fiber, functional snacks, low-carb snacks, protein-fortified snacks offering satiety. Snack bars with fortified functional ingredients are about to see notable demand.
Snack bars have also responded to diet trends such as gluten-free and Paleo diets, and as such launches of grain-free and even meat-based snack bars have increased.
The sugar content of bars is likely to be increasingly scrutinized by health-conscious consumers and is a constraint for the category. Snack bars are an inexpensive source of nutrition, which has resulted in the replacement of other traditional foods. The rising demand for ready-to-eat (RTE) food is expected to be a major factor in influencing snack bar market growth in the near future.
GRANOLA GRABS SHARE
The snack bar market is segmented based on type and ingredients. There are various products available as snack bars such as breakfast bars, energy bars, fruit bars, granola, nutritional bars and others. However, among all the available options, granola bars accounted for the highest sales followed by breakfast/cereal bars.
Fruit-based snack bars are playing a big role in this category. This format utilizes fruit as binder and sweetener agent, enabling the snack bars to make “no added sugar” claims which resonate with an increasingly sugar-wary consumer. Nutrition bar market grew 34% reaching $2.2 billion and had a market share of 39.6, the Mordor report found.
The U.S. remains the largest market for snack bars with the highest sales accounting for 42% of the global sales, the Mordor report found.
COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE
The global snack bar market is fragmented and consists of many small and large players worldwide. The companies such as Kellogg, Nature Valley, Alpen and Jordan are the major players. Quest brand has performed very well in the nutritional bars segment, and it has grown 450% by distribution gains and strong sales in the existing channels. The sales of Nature Valley protein bars grew by 10% in both value and volume.
In terms of breakfast bars, IRI reported that the U.S. market was down slightly. Sales slipped 1% to $180.68 million for the 52 weeks ending Dec. 31, 2017. That’s It Nutrition and Best Maid Cookie Co. and saw the biggest dollar sales gains increasing 9.62% and 47.22% respectively.