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They were, of course, correct. The recipe for Mars, long one of the most popular chocolate bars in Canada, has never included peanuts—just chocolate, caramel, and nougat. (The Canadian Mars bar should not be confused with the almond-embedded Mars bar that is no longer sold in the US.)
What's different, according to Melodie Nash, brand manager at Toronto-based Effem Inc., the Canadian headquarters for Mars, Snickers, and Twix bars, is the process for Mars bars, which has been modified to ensure they don't contain even the slightest trace of peanuts.
Its nearby plant in Newmarket, Ontario, was recently shut down and thoroughly sanitized. The production of other products at the facility, such as Snickers bars, which do contain peanuts, was eliminated. Nash says the company was concerned cross-contamination of other products could infect the manufacturing of Mars bars. (Nut-free products manufactured in a facility that makes nut-containing items carry a warning of this fact on their labels.)
The move was made in response to both consumer demand and regulatory changes, she says. In January 2006, the government of Ontario, the largest and most populous province in the country, passed "Sabrina's Law," named in honor of Sabrina Shannon, a 13-year-old girl who died as a result of an anaphylactic attack at her school in 2003. (Anaphylaxis is a serious, often fatal allergic reaction, most often caused by peanuts and peanut-related products, which causes one's windpipe to swell shut.)
The year-old legislation requires schools to have strategies in place so students do not come into contact with peanuts or products containing peanuts.
"[The law] was happening in Ontario and we expect it to happen in the rest of Canada," Nash says, noting that more than 1.2 million Canadians live with the risk of an anaphylactic reaction and more than 2 percent of all Canadian children have peanut allergies.
"You have to put very strict procedures in place," she says. "You don't want to have products that can cause a reaction. We test the raw ingredients from other manufacturers and we have vendor-assurance and allergen-testing awareness programs with our associates at Effem," she says.
Nash notes Mars is the first regular-sized chocolate bar in Canada to become truly peanut-free, putting it ahead of the curve of its competitors.
"[The peanut-free trend] hasn't hit all provinces but it will continue to grow—there's been a need for it for a while," she says, adding that Mars' campaign has received plenty of support within the trade, at Ontario schools, and with consumers last Halloween.
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A Growing Trend
She'll get no argument from Jeff Schoo, director of food at Pepsi-QTG Canada, which produces the Quaker brand of granola bars. It recently launched seven Quaker Chewy Peanut-Free bars—Apple Crumble, Banana Delight, Bumble Berry, Chocolate Chip, Raspberry Crumble, Rocky Road, and S'mores—because it wanted to provide a lunchbox-friendly option for parents while supporting anaphylaxis policies in schools.
"Life-threatening allergies are a growing concern in Canada and, as a result, there has been more consumer demand for peanut-free products," he says.
Schoo says the company is proud that Canada has been the global leader on peanut-free granola bars and notes the product has been "extremely" successful since hitting store shelves last spring. For competitive reasons, he wasn't able to speculate on when the Quaker brand's peanut-free products might be rolled out into other markets, such as the US.
Pepsi-QTG has also done its utmost to ensure safety wasn't compromised in converting its Peterborough, Ontario, plant to a peanut-free facility. Some of the steps it took to ensure there wasn't any cross contamination include having the manufacturing areas closely supervised and restricted, with a staging area that features wash-downs and special clothing both on entry and exit; auditing and requiring each Chewy supplier to sign a commitment to meet the new ingredient-control policy; rigorous testing on both the ingredients coming into the facility as well as the finished product; and restricting employees from bringing products containing peanuts into the facility at all times.
Schoo says Quaker has other granola bars—such as Dipps, Trail Mix, and Yogourt, all of which are manufactured in a different facility—that may feature peanuts or tree nuts. Possible confusion of the different bars is why peanut-free consumers should continue to be diligent while at the grocery store.
"It will continue to be important to read the label every time," he cautions.
To get its peanut-free message out to the masses, Effem developed a fully integrated marketing campaign, including television, print, and point-of-sale materials. One TV ad is particularly effective—it shows two young students sitting down beside a Mars bar vending machine in their school's cafeteria to enjoy a snack of unshelled peanuts. After the first shell is cracked, the machine shuffles several feet in the opposite direction. It moves a few feet further when the second shell is broken. Finally, when yet another peanut is opened, the machine can't take it anymore and bolts out of the cafeteria, bowling over everything in its path.
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One Problem, Two Approaches
Derrick Coupland, a partner at Blacksheep Strategy, a Winnipeg, Canada-based branding strategy company, says while both companies are capitalizing on a market opportunity, they're going about it in different ways.
Effem is promoting an existing attribute that the marketplace suddenly cares about while Pepsi-QTG is creating products to fit into a new category.
He says Quaker has done health and wellness searches to create granola bars in a number of categories over the years, such as low calcium, low fat, and low sugar.
"Peanut-free is another category the market is now conscious of. The way Quaker has managed its brand architecture, it's quite natural for the company to create a peanut-free version of their bars," he says.
Coupland says the risk for Quaker is if it launches too many sub-brands, the marketplace won't be able to keep track of them all or tell the difference between them.
"The sub-brands will fall out of favor because they'll have sliced the market too thin," he says.
Coupland cautions that the peanut-free program is far from risk-free for Mars, particularly with its regular consumers, because it's focusing on a brand characteristic that hasn't mattered previously.
"It's clearly not leveraging any brand attributes or preferences that current users would have," he says. "It's a very specific campaign targeted to a very specific portion of the market.
"[The company is] moving off of the core platform and message, which has [been successful] with its customers. [Being peanut-free] hasn't mattered until now and the company is saying there's a sensitivity in the marketplace. What it's not doing is promoting the good old reasons why people have preferred Mars bars all along."
Coupland says the confidence and safety campaign is forcing consumers to move away from the usual value equation of Mars bars and contemplate something that previously wasn't significant to them.
"A safety feature and junk food—those two things aren't an obvious association," he says.
Coupland adds that nobody used to talk about food safety, but it became a regular water-cooler topic when the mad-cow crisis hit North America several years ago.
"[Food safety] used to be a non-issue—but now it's becoming part of the consciousness of consumers, producers, and marketers," he says. "Consumers are sensitized to this and that gives Mars and Quaker the opportunity to capitalize on it."
[21-May-2007]
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Renée Alexander is a freelance business and lifestyle writer based in Winnipeg, Canada.
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