Kids’ Healthy Snack Zones Coming to Grocery Stores

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With all the Smart Snack changes rolling out in schools nationwide this fall, attention may begin to turn to what kids are buying at the grocery store. One food company is making major improvements in what they offer and how they market it to kids.

Giant Eagle is in the process of installing the go-to kid sections, labeled “Kids’ Healthy Snack Zone,” in about 400 stores in the mid-Atlantic and Ohio. And Walmart is piloting the concept in 30 stores in California, with plans to roll it out to 1,500 stores later this fall.

Bolthouse Farms is responsible for making this effort in grocery stores throughout the US. They are the same company that released the extreme baby carrot campaign, which marketed ranch and chili-lime dusted carrots as go-to snacks for kids.

The company has been developing products such as pureed fruit tubes that kids can suck and slurp, all-fruit smoothies and bags of baby carrots called Veggie Snackers that come with pouches of bright-colored, bold-flavored seasonings.

When kids open the package and shake in the seasoning, the carrots take on some of the characteristics of chips like Doritos. “They give you that crunch and flavor,” says Jeff Dunn, CEO of Bolthouse. “You’re going to lick your fingers, and get that same sensory [experience] you get with salty snacks.”

Dunn, a former Coca-Cola executive, is borrowing a lot of the marketing and design tactics used in the soda and snack industries to drive up demand in the healthy snacks business.

And many grocery retailers are eager to get in on the action. Laura Karet, CEO of Giant Eagle, says when she was first pitched the kid-focused destination in her stores’ produce aisles, she thought, “This is a win-win.”

“When I go into the produce section,” Karet says, “there’s not quite as much going on for [kids] compared to, say, the cereal aisle or the candy shelves.”
And she’s hoping the new approach will make the produce section pop for more kids. The price point, at $3.99 for multi-packs of Fruit Tubes and Veggie Snackers, is competitive, too.

“I think the kid-friendly snacking stations are an absolutely fascinating concept,” says , a behavioral economist at Cornell University. Telling kids what they should eat is not very effective, he says. “They’re not concerned about beta-carotene, or what diseases they might get when they’re 50. They’re much more in the moment.”

Find out more from NPR’s coverage of the healthy snacks changes!