Chippidy-doo-daa chippidy-ay

Next Monday sees the much-anticipated arrival of a couple of new snacking products. After a great fanfare from the trade press, Warburtons new range of premium snacks is with us.

So will ChippidyDooDaa (four flavours – Mature Cheese & Spring Onion, Chilli Jack, Sea Salt & Malt Vinegar and Sea Salt & Cracked Black Pepper – of golden baked pitta chips that are ideal for snacking and dipping) and SnackaDoodle (wholegrain snacks available in 20g single-serve bags or six-pack multipacks in Cheddar Cheese & Onion and Sweet Chilli flavours) be a success?

The snacking market is huge, and growing. During a recent conversation, Adam Peasey from United Biscuits mentioned that the company had undertaken a huge piece of research looking at the possibilities within the very, very broad church of ‘snacking’. The research found that if companies and retailers catered for every potential need-state of the snacking customer, the market could be £540million larger.

As far as Warburtons are concerned, the money and potential are there. Even in a market that is full of a bewildering array of different flavours, sizes, formats and niches, there is still space for new products to come in.

Leaving aside my own personal concerns with the names of the products – I really don’t know whether ChippidyDooDaa and SnackaDoodle are names that scream about the premium quality goods found within them – it might be worth making room for these products on your shelves.

Warburtons is a name of great heritage, trusted by consumers up and down the land. It’s not a name that one would automatically associate with snack products – and it may take a little while before people are fully sold on the idea and convinced that they aren’t buying a small-serve bread product – but every brand has to start somewhere.

The large chocolate brands managed to move into the ice cream sector easily enough, and Trebor’s shift into the gum market has been well received, so there is scope for a brand like this to shift itself sideways and expand its portfolio.

As Jonathan Warburton himself said, consumers will be ‘interested and intrigued’ by these new products. They won’t be the only ones.