Indeed, Rewey and her colleagues have lots to crow about. For the four weeks ending January 26, Splenda’s dollar-market share of the tabletop-sweetener market exceeded that of Equal-branded products for the first time, 29.7 percent to 27.2 percent, according to Information Resources Inc., a Chicago-based concern that tracks CPG sales in all mass stores except Wal-Mart. Sweet'N Low sugar substitutes stayed in third place, with a 19.5-percent market share. Those numbers further displayed momentum that began last year, when Splenda’s dollar sales rose about 69 percent while Equal’s fell by 8 percent and Sweet'N Low’s rose 1 percent.

Rewey says food companies are coming to understand the essence of the Splenda proposition, which revolves around choice. “A large percentage of consumers want different choices: 75 percent are ‘regular’ consumers versus diet consumers, and they prefer regular products,” she says. “But they want more choices around how much sugar or calories they get in a variety of products throughout the day.”

McNeil launched Splenda direct to consumers as a tabletop and cooking sweetener in 2000. Demand outstripped supply within a few months, so the company pulled back on marketing until after its new Splenda plant in Alabama opened in 2001. Since then, Splenda has launched a blistering marketing assault on Equal and Sweet'N Low.

One reason the market has proven so receptive to Splenda’s message is that McNeil uses “viral” marketing, taking advantage of the fact that a significant minority of Splenda users become absolutely fanatical about the product -- and that they tend to tell others about their experience with the ingredient. Much of this has taken place on the Internet, Rewey explains, because the best place for consumers to obtain Splenda after its 1998 debut up through 2001, when the Alabama plant came up, was online. “We had the ‘Net buzz and chat-room stuff going,” she says.

McNeil also patiently built the product-benefit and regulatory case for Splenda over the several years that the FDA was evaluating its safety. McNeil courted doctors, dietitians and other health-care providers “to make sure they knew about the soundness of Splenda,” Rewey says. The company would attend conventions about nutrition and provide product samples and information. “We did this because lots of customers want to know, ‘Is this OK for me and can I trust it?’ ” Rewey says. Its case was buttressed in January when Dr. Robert Atkins, originator of the increasingly popular Atkins Diet, endorsed sucralose and even Splenda by name as the healthiest artificial sweetener in an appearance on American talk show Larry King Live.

Splenda’s increasing patina as a healthful and even “natural” product riles rivals, because while it starts out as sugar, it ends up as the very chemical substance sucralose. “Look at the chemical structure of the compounds,” notes Ted Ziemann, president of the Health & Food Technologies division of Cargill Inc., the Minneapolis-based commodities giant that has developed and is beginning to market its own non-sugar sweeteners.

Nevertheless, competitors also recognize that the marketing resources and prowess of Johnson & Johnson are going to buy Splenda lots of attention. “Splenda is essentially the new Equal, in that it’s coming on like gangbusters with very large advertising budgets and television campaigns and lots of spending to get shelf space,” says Decker.

So Cumberland Packing Corp., the Brooklyn, New York-based company that has manufactured saccharin-based Sweet‘N Low for four decades, is adapting. When Equal emerged as a major threat about 20 years ago, Sweet'N Low took aim at that invading brand. But with Splenda’s emergence, Decker says, “We felt that just recognizing Equal was probably too narrow.” So Sweet'N Low’s new slogan (“Wherever you go, Sweet'N Low”) nods at the brand’s history. It also has tweaked media buying in an effort to reach audiences younger than its core market of 25- to 54-year-old women, and it has redoubled efforts to place Sweet‘N Low in movies and TV shows.

Last year, Cumberland managed to get the US Congress to give saccharin a clean bill of health, 20 years after a flawed study (which administered huge quantities of the artificial sweetener to laboratory rats) produced bladder tumors. “We were able to remove the saccharin warning from all of our products, and that was a big deal,” Decker says. “We went so far as to replace the cancer warning with the Good Housekeeping Seal. We turned unfair negatives into an immediate positive.”

Decker notes that Equal has taken a much bigger hit in terms of market share from Splenda than Sweet'N Low has and says that Sweet'N Low, which is priced much lower than Splenda and Equal, remains “the number one-selling brand in terms of units and volume.”

Equal’s new, US$ 15-million ad campaign stresses the product’s food-friendly flavor. In the past, says Kim Clay, director of communications for Merisant Corp., the Chicago-based manufacturer of Equal and NutraSweet, Equal “had been considered a dieter’s brand: great taste with zero calories. That’s why we used the celebrities in the ads. But now we’re repositioning Equal as a more mainstream brand with a broader target than people who are dieting: younger women, 35-plus, who aren’t so much looking for a diet product but who want a product that allows foods to taste good without extra sugar.”

Equal has been vulnerable to Sweet'N Low’s characterization of its rival as having a bitter aftertaste, Clay concedes. “But in taste tests, lots of people think we’re the same as the pink stuff [Sweet'N Low].” Merisant also is using B. Smith’s endorsement to take a chunk out of the presumption that Equal can’t be used in baking; both Sweet'N Low and Splenda hold up better. “There are special recipes that the Equal test kitchen has developed, so Equal can be used in baking,” Clay explains. “You just have to do it a certain way, at the end of the baking cycle.”

And while Equal is no longer fighting just Sweet'N Low, Clay puts a positive spin on the new attention that Splenda has brought the sugar-substitute marketplace. “Splenda has brought new ‘news’ to the category,” she says, “which is great for all of us.”    

[28-Apr-2003]