Bel Group’s Laughing Cow has just launched its new Creamy Asiago Cheese and Cheese Dippers snacks with small breadsticks to match, released to market this month.
The latest products have been in the works a while, Frederic Nalis Executive Vice President Americas, told the Chicago Tribune, saying that it has taken two years to bring the soft cheese packages with mini breadsticks from Europe to the U.S.
"We thought maybe [U.S. consumers] would prefer crackers to bread sticks,” he said, explaining some of the changes that had taken place to appeal to the different demographic. “The second thing is we had to validate the cheese flavor favored by U.S. consumers. We uncovered that actually our original flavor was the favorite of both kids and adults."
After all that, however, the only real change was in the marketing of the product. And there is plenty more to come, Nalis reports.
New flavors take about three years of planning, and already the company has new products lined up for launch as far forward as 2019 to 2021.
The company tests new flavors every couple of years, according to the Tribune, ensuring a well-stocked pipeline to counteract flavors that are not well received.
"Because there is a high failure rate of innovation — more than nine new products out of ten die within three years of its launch in the consumer packaged goods industry — we need to be very organized and forward-looking in our process so that we're able to have a lot of products in our pipeline," Nalis said.
The processed cheese segment has seen a three percent growth spurt in the last five years, reaching $4.2 billion in 2015, according to Mintel Market research, with consumers showing a preference for natural cheeses without additives or preservatives (whose sales were up 31 percent to $17.3 billion).
Though Laughing Cow is considered a processed cheese, and Mini Babybel is semi-soft cheese, Bel looks to keep a few tricks up its sleeve to keep its snacks in the game into the 2020s.
DeliMarket News will continue to keep you up to date on all the latest products and trends as they continue to sway the deli industry.
