Time for pink sweets?

We all enjoyed the “good news” story over the weekend of William and Catherine’s new baby girl. I wonder how many sweet shops are now eagerly developing a pink display to encourage their customers to celebrate with a good helping of pink sweets?

We had a ponder and realised just how many great sweets are pink! The fact that we all love strawberry flavoured sweets certainly helps this. So here’s a quick list from us of pink sweets that might just fit the bill for your royal baby girl celebrations:

• Shrimps
• Pink Hearts
• Porky Pigs
• Strawberry Bon Bons
• Strawberry Milkshake Bottles
• Pink Mallows (Princess Mallows even!)
• Raspberry and Strawberry Millions
• Strawberry Jelly Beans
• Pinkies
• Strawberry Belts and Whips

You could pack up small amounts of these pink sweets into bags or containers and adorn with pink ribbons or perhaps just refresh your pick and mix display and join in the celebration. Either way, these sweets are generally very good sellers and so doing something creative could be quite worthwhile. We hope that we might have inspired a little bit of thought around pink sweets!

www.sweetretailing.co.uk

 

7 flavoured chocolate bar

Cadbury Dairy Milk have been having some fun and created a chocolate bar that contains seven of their most popular flavours. Sounds interesting! Each strip contains a different flavour and the line-up includes:

• Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel
• Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut
• Cadbury Dairy Milk Whole Nut
• Cadbury Dairy Milk Oreo
• Cadbury Dairy Milk Daim
• Cadbury Dairy Milk Turkish 

Well spotted, that's six! We're assuming that the seventh is Cadbury Dairy Milk itself.

A nice idea, but they've only created 50! So a few will be up for grabs on their Twitter feed and just a handful will be available for us Brits to win.

Named Cadbury Dairy Milk Spectacular 7, you cannot help feeling that they have missed an opportunity to do something more here? Perhaps it will provide inspiration for other chocolatiers to mash up their flavours in the same bar...

www.sweetretailing.co.uk

Easter could have been bigger!

According to retail and FMCG market intelligence company IRI, the supermarkets missed out on Easter egg sales this year, to the benefit of smaller and convenience stores who held their nerve with stock right up until the day. So the message is that Easter confectionery sales, whilst good, could actually have been greater than they were.

Measuring sales across all of the major UK grocery multiples, IRI suggests that Easter confectionery was up 8.6% during the five week period before Easter Saturday; better than expected.

March saw plenty of heavy promotional activity in some supermarkets and this helped to drive sales upwards – volume rising by 15.1% on last year. 

Despite all of this growth, IRI has estimated that a whopping £5.2m of confectionery sales was missed out on during the final week before Easter Day.

“We’ve seen some reports suggesting that supermarkets were running out of eggs in the final week before Easter,” according to Martin Wood, Head of Strategic Insight – Retail for IRI. “So while sales did increase in that final week, they didn’t increase as much as they had in the earlier pre-Easter period starting in early March. I would estimate that the missed opportunity was £5.2m – this is the difference between the increase in sales that occurred in the final week and the increase that would have happened if the average sales growth over the 5-week Lent period had been maintained.”

What this suggests to us is that we’re seeing a resurgence of seasonal event management in retail this year, following strong Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day sales. But it’s also clear that the major supermarkets underestimated the demand for Easter and that other retailers, like convenience stores, benefitted from this. It’s reasonable to assume that they could have done a lot better this year if they hadn’t sold out of eggs!”

www.sweetretailing.co.uk

 

Poster made of sweets

Here’s some great inspiration for a retail display. Celebrating the launch of the new SpongeBob film, renowned food artist, Mark Northeast has created a promotional poster entirely out of pick and mix! This is a UK first.

On display at Empire Cinemas in Walthamstow, the poster includes 24 different types of sweets and over 400 individual sweets including: 90 foam bananas, of which 60 were used for the lettering, 60 fried eggs, 60 shrimps, 25 pieces of fudge, 50 blue dolphins, 10 strawberries and many more tasty treats available from the pick 'n’ mix counter at Empire Cinemas.

Mark Northeast, owner of Creative Food Design, stated “This has to go down as one of the largest and most fun projects I’ve undertaken. The preparation was key and from the outset, I visualised how the image would take shape. The plan was to layer the different characters at varying heights in order to achieve a sense of depth to the picture. 

“One of the toughest elements of the project was trying to cut and shape the 24 different varieties of sweets to use them in the picture. Some are brittle and can snap easily while others were incredibly chewy. Where possible I tried to use the sweet in its original form, but some improvisation was necessary – for example, removing the yolks of about 80 fried eggs so they laid flat on the picture. Each of the 90 bananas that were used had to be cut down in thickness to make them suitable for the letters and SpongeBob’s body.”

So, what creative displays could this encourage you to try in your own shop? It could become quite a crowd puller and that means customers! Good luck.

www.sweetretailing.co.uk