Given that it mainly peddles sugar and calorie-laden products deemed junk food and held dubious by everyone from the mayor of New York to the family pediatrician, how does the Hershey Company plan to nearly double its global revenues over the next five years?

Well, Hershey plans to leverage strategic innovation, global expansion, "impulsivity" and something called "hand-to-mouth platforms" to become a $10 billion company by 2017 (after posting revenues of $6.6 billion last year) despite the increasing encroachments of better-for-you products and nutritional cautions in the U.S. and other key markets.

"Our plan builds off the insights-driven, consumer-centric business approach we built in 2008 but takes it to the next level," Michele Buck, senior vice president and growth officer of Hershey, said at a recent analyst confab in New York, according to Food Business News. The strategy relies largely on global expansion of core brands: Hershey's, Reese's, the Kisses brand, Jolly Rancher's and Ice Breakers as well as "selectively build[ing] out our portfolio in other on-trend segments."

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Candy and chocolate generally bring happiness to most folks, but they also are keeping a few law firms working overtime.

The latest ruling finds Nestle winning a case that Cadbury had brought against it to try and stop the trademarking of the shape of its Kit Kat bars. Cadbury had taken offense at Nestlé’s 2006 trademarking of Kit Kat as “four trapezoidal bars aligned on a rectangular base.”

After all, as TheHindu.com notes, Cadbury has its own similar chocolate bar, the Crispello, which has a “creamy centre, wrapped in a delicate crispy shell, covered with a delicious layer of Cadbury chocolate.”

But sorry, Cadbury. This time, you lose. Cadbury’s legal team will just have to remember how sweet it felt to beat Nestle recently in a battle over the color purple.Continue reading...

The folks that make Peeps, those little marshmallow-chick candies found nesting in Easter baskets each year, have tried to market their product to fit other holidays such as Christmas (snowman and Christmas tree Peeps!), Valentine’s Day (heart Peeps!), and Halloween (Guys: there are pumpkin, ghost, and cat Peeps!) Nice try, Peeps, but the enduring image of the candy is still poking out of Easter baskets, no matter what Just Born seems to do. After all, 700 million of the sugar-beeked things are sold around that time of year.  

Undeterred, Peeps is soldiering on and making another effort this year to break the wall down and market itself as a year-round sweet treat. The brand's holiday 2012 collection includes a new Peeps on Earth line of T-shirts, infant clothing, and water bottles, according to a press release.Continue reading...

McDonald's and Coca-Cola aren't the only food and snack brands whose sponsorship of the planet's premier platform for healthy living — the Olympic Games — has been challenged by healthy living advocates. Cadbury is the official snack brand of the London 2012 Summer Games, and has been conducting a marketing blitz in the UK including hosting a free interactive pavilion in London's Hyde Park from July 27 through Aug. 12. And it may not be such a stretch to argue that some chocolate products may aid health.Continue reading...

No brand wants to be caught on the wrong side of history, shifting consumer tastes or technological obsolescence. (See: Twinkies, BetaMax.)

So Mars, Inc. is bidding to get ahead of where the entire food industry seems to be going by vowing to stop selling chocolate products with more than 250 calories in them by the end of next year. It’s part of the company's ongoing corporate citizenship effort to improve the nutritional value of its products and to sell them in a responsible way.

Mars produces seven of the world’s 20 best-selling chocolate brands, including Snickers, Mars, Dove/Galaxy, M&M's, and non-chocolatey confections including Skittles and Juicy Fruit gum. Now, by deposing king-size chocolate bars, the 540-calorie king-size Snickers bar, for instance, will be a goner after next year. 

As Mars noted on its Facebook page, the calorie-cutting efforts are part of a bigger responsible marketing commitment the company made five years ago to promote nutrition — and stop buying ad time or space if more than one quarter of the audience was estimated to be under 12 years old.Continue reading...

British candy maker Cadbury has been wrapping up its chocolates in a particular purple wrapper for more than 100 years. It was originally meant as a way of honoring Queen Victoria. The company felt so attached to that shade of the color that it registered it as a trademark back in 2008.

When it was granted, one of its main competitors, Nestlé, decided to put up a fight, which has gone on now for three years before ending when the registrar at the UK Intellectual Property Office decided that the Kraft-owned Cadbury was within its rights to ask for Pantone 2865c to be exclusively theirs for chocolate products and drinks.

If the trademark had been lifted, the Birmingham News reports that it would have “opened the floodgates for rivals, including supermarkets, to use the color on their own-brand chocolate bars.” Sweetening the sting of the ruling, Time.com notes that Nestle (and anyone else) can still use Pantone 2865c on any other products that they’d like.Continue reading...

While Thor was #1 at the box office this past weeked (don't miss our Brandcameo product placement review of the film), perhaps a bigger product placement story involves another golden ticket.

The 40th anniversary of the release of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the June 1971 adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic starring Gene Wilder, was the greatest reverse product placement of all time. But what few know is that Wonka was also to be one of the first big corporate product placements.Continue reading...

The first Easter candy was thought to be chocolate eggs, which appeared in Europe in the early 1800s. Cadbury has built an entire business around that concept, with over fifteen different chocolate egg products (including the seasonal Creme Egg) available for Easter.

But one of the most recognizable Easter candies in the U.S. is undoubtedly those little yellow marshmallow chicks known as Peeps. They're Justin Bieber's favorite candy, as Conan O'Brien teased him above, and they've inspired fans (from Washington Post readers to Zappos employees) to fashion them into artistic scenes.Continue reading...