A Guide to Snacking: Alternative Snacks

The notion of “healthy snacking” has become prevalent in the convenience channel within the last couple of years, and retailers are aggressively searching for ways to capitalize.

Convenience stores and healthy snacks are no longer mutually exclusive concepts, with the alternative snacks category fitting well into the growing consumer demand for better-for-you products.

Meat snacks, the largest alternative snacks segment (at 60 percent of the category’s sales), showed strong growth for the 52-week period ended Feb. 14, 2015, with a 13-percent gain in dollar sales at convenience stores. This increase was triple the percentage-point gain from the previous 52-week period.

Convenience stores and supermarkets are nearly neck-and-neck in dollar share of alternative snacks, but c-stores have the lead in unit share compared to the supermarket and drug retail channels.

Click here to continue reading the “Top Trends in Alternative Snacks” special feature, published in the May Convenience Store News Guide to Snacking.