According to Kind Snacks, children in the U.S. are eating 4.7 billion pounds of added sugar every year–enough to cover 1,740 football fields. That translates into about 13.1 million pounds of added sugar every day–or enough to fill 273 school buses.
To help better illustrate these stats, the company built a three-story-high pile of sugar in New York City’s Times Square to represent the amount of added sugar children are eating in the U.S. every five minutes.
The installation marks the launch of Kind’s first foray beyond snack bars and granola, into the $963 million fruit snack bar category. The brand sees an opportunity in a slowing of fruit snack sales, thanks to people becoming more conscious of ingredients, and getting turned off by seeing added sugar as the first on the list.
Kind Snacks founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky says the fruit snacks category today reminds him of the traditional energy bar category back in the early 2000s. “The bars on the market at that time were filled with added sugar and undecipherable ingredients,” says Lubetzky. “As we introduced our original Kind Fruit & Nut bar, a gradual shift started to occur and consumers began demanding more wholesome options made from recognizable ingredients. That shift has now extended into the fruit snacks category, which is currently ripe for innovation.”
The brand conducted a consumer survey and found that 79% of parents don’t know what added sugars are, 76% don’t know how much added sugar their kids should limit themselves to in one day, 77% think their kid consumes less added sugar than the average child, but 85& admit not knowing how much added sugar the average child eats in one day.
“We discovered that most people don’t even realize that the fruit snacks they’re feeding their kids are filled with added sugar,” says Lubetzky. “So by providing consumers with a healthy solution made with only fruit and no added sugars, we hope to clear up confusion created by the category.”
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