Selling Snacks To Teenagers Isn’t That Easy Keebler Tests New Products And Ads On High School Students
David Karpick, a lanky, 6-foot-3-inch mechanical engineer, doesn’t look much like a cookie elf.
Then again, neither do Lynn Benkusky or any of the other 103 people who work at Keebler Co.’s semi-secret development laboratory in west suburban Elmhurst, Ill.
The products that have made Britishowned Keebler the nation’s secondlargest cookie and cracker manufacturer, with annual sales of $1.7 billion, are developed and tested there without an elf in sight. (The biggest company is RJR Nabisco Inc., with about $3 billion in cookie and cracker sales.)
The folks at Keebler are less concerned about company mascot Ernie the Elf these days than they are about 70 students from nearby York High School who will be providing advice on how to crack the crucial market for teenage snack foods.
Ernie is the cartoon character who lives in a hollow tree. And Keebler, a subsidiary of United Biscuits based in England, for years has used him to plug its lines of cookies and crackers.
“Ernie is still there, but he’s in the background,” said J. Prescott “Scott” Wallace, Keebler’s vice president of marketing for salty snacks, which includes assorted chips and pretzels.
His usefulness, however, is limited when it comes to plugging products for teens, company officials concede. That is where the York students come into the picture.
“Take a look at these ads and tell me what you think,” Karpick, marketing manager for salty snacks, asked one group of food science students touring the Keebler facility Tuesday. The ads were for an asyet-secret potato chip derivative the company hopes to have on supermarket shelves this spring.
After a round of frowns, Karpick handed out another prospective ad. “Is this better?”
The nods made it unanimous for Ad No. 2.
“As a company, we are trying to be a little smarter about marketing to specific age groups,” Karpick said later.
“We had a disproportionate segment of our products consumed by the teen market, but we weren’t talking to them,” added Wallace.
Cookies account for more than a quarter of Keebler’s sales, and crackers add 21 percent. Salty snacks - potato chips, pretzels and assorted chips - make up 16 percent. The company hopes to use the students two or three times a month to look at and evaluate products, packages, promotions and ideas pertaining to the teen market. In return, the company will provide periodic presentations at York on career opportunities in the food-service industry.
Like most companies in that business, Keebler for years has had an elaborate product development process. This includes market research in shopping malls around the country, testing for such things as color, texture and taste. There also are labs that check the packaging to make sure moisture doesn’t leak in to make crackers soggy or light to blanch the color of cookies.
There’s even a gas chromatograph in the chemistry lab to check the fat and cholesterol levels in Keebler products, said chemist Mark Westerhoff.
“We have 600 people from the Elmurst area who we have come in and tasted our products to tell us whether they like them,” said Lynn Benkusky, sensory researcher. “We just started 150 kids and teens in the fall.”