Japan-based Calbee is most well-known for its snacks business, particularly its dominance of the potato sticks market in and out of its home ground.
The firm’s Frugra granola brand has also been a market leader in Japan for many years with an average of 52% of local market share, but has only really started gaining significant recognition out of the country in recent years.
“Calbee’s overseas business makes up about 25% of the company, and the ambition is to increase this over the next few years using some of our strong-performing brands,” Calbee (Hangzhou) Vice Managing Director and CMO Hiroyuki Miyakura said.
“Frugra has been identified as one of the brands to lead this charge due to its strong market performance both in Japan as well as markets like China.
“It also has very strong potential due to its unique crunchy texture and thoughtful design, whereby every spoonful is just the right size and contains the right balance of both granola and toppings e.g. fruit to be enjoyed in one bite.”
Calbee’s strength in the potato sticks category has ensured it a firm hold on snacking occasions, but outside of Japan its presence in the breakfast consumption occasion is still relatively small – a situation that the company hopes to change.
“Our main products all along have been snacks and cereals, but with ageing populations on the rise in many markets including Japan, the snack and cereal markets that are usually popular with younger consumers will also reduce,” he added.
“Calbee believes that our opportunity with granola in particular is to target the breakfast consumption occasion.
“More specifically, we want to capture the consumers who are in search of high quality, value-added breakfast options to become the number one choice whenever anyone thinks of healthy breakfast.
“Based on our internal research, Frugra is currently most valued by consumers for convenience, taste and satiety – these are values we must maintain and enhance.
“Conversely, in scenarios where consumers eat cereal but bypass Frugra, we have found that the value found to be most lacking for them is health, hence moving forward we plan to promote health as a new Frugra core value and invest more resources into doing this.
How to apply localisation to cereal innovation
Although cereal is a familiar breakfast option to most Asian consumers, there are actually very different ways of eating cereal between different cultures.
“In Japan, eating cold cereal i.e. granola with cold milk is the mainstream way of eating cereal,” he said.
“But this can be different in other markets, for example in China, where hot cereal like congee is actually the mainstream way of consumption.”
Another example is in the Philippines, where it is common to either add table sugar to cereal for breakfast. Champorado or chocolate cereal is also a regular breakfast item, where chocolate is added to cereal grains and warmed up.
As such, Calbee intends to look at more diverse and localised marketing strategies to appeal to the various local markets.
“One of Frugra’s strong points is its taste, so we will utilise this to continue to create opportunities for more new consumers to try this – specifically, we plan to regularly introduce limited-edition products as well as IP marketing,” he added.
IP marketing here refers to the brand’s collaborations with popular characters or franchises.
