Inside Mondelēz SnackFutures

INSIDE MONDELEZ SNACKFUTURES COLAB

This month, Mondelēz SnackFutures launched applications for their 2022 CoLab. The CoLab cohort will participate in a 12-week program, customized for each startup’s business challenges and priorities -- with a key emphasis on hands-on interaction, individual attention, mentorship and workshops. The curriculum will be a combination of virtual sessions and in-person activities. In addition to the in-depth experience, participants will also receive a $20,000 grant.

Startup CPG WHY DID MONDELĒZ START SNACKFUTURES?

Mondelēz International Mondelēz International is on a mission to lead the future of snacking by providing the right snack, for the right moment, made the right way. To keep satisfying consumers’ changing needs, we need to continually evolve our broad range of snacks, and this is where SnackFutures plays a role.

SnackFutures is the Mondelēz International innovation and venture hub, deliberately designed to push the boundaries in snacking by capitalizing on consumer trends and emerging growth opportunities in well-being snacks around the world. The SnackFutures mission is to create and invest in well-being snacks that are good for people, kind to the planet and deliciously fun.

WHAT HAS THE MONDELĒZ TEAM LEARNED ABOUT SNACK TRENDS FROM THIS PROGRAM?

Since SnackFutures launched in 2018, we have launched five new well-being brands in the US and Europe (NoCoé, Dirt Kitchen Snacks, CaPao, Millie Gram and Ruckus and Co), made minority investments in Uplift Food, Torr and Hu (which was acquired by Mondelēz International in January 2021), launched the CoLab startup engagement program and established a global footprint.

Our team is hyper consumer-centric and dedicated to understanding consumers’ worlds and developing snacking solutions for their needs. So much has changed since we launched (and with the COVID-19 pandemic), but we continue to see consumers are increasingly focused on well-being and interested in knowing more about what they’re eating, where it comes from and how it’s made.

WHAT KINDS OF RELATIONSHIPS DOES THE MONDELĒZ TEAM HOPE TO DEVELOP WITH THE COHORT IN THE LONG TERM?

CoLab was designed to be a collaborative effort between entrepreneurs and the Mondelēz International ecosystem to drive mutual growth. SnackFutures provides the participating startups with tools, technologies and access to networks and industry expertise, while gaining insights, capabilities and prospective investment opportunities.

A PARTICIPANT’S PERSPECTIVE Sydney Chasin – Founder of Chasin’ Dreams Farm

Sydney Chasin, Founder of Chasin’ Dreams Farm (a popped sorghum snack) was a member of the 2020-2021 CoLab cohort. Chasin calls the CoLab program “a CPG Playland, like rocket fuel” for the brand. “CoLab isn’t just looking to help brands from a retail distribution standpoint, or just from an operational end -- the program was a 360 approach to brand building.” Each founder was paired with a Snack Futures Buddy, their mentor for the program who worked to connect founders to anyone within the Mondelēz network, from distributors to branding experts. The Mondelēz team helped Chasin learn how to “push forward, and push forward faster.”

“When we entered the program, we were still working to articulate who we were as a brand and what was most important to our customers and investors,” she says. Throughout the course of the program, Mondelēz worked to help Chasin answer these questions. Her mentor set up meetings with brand leaders and consumer insights professionals on Hu, Oreo and Perfect Bar brands, who helped them design research studies. SnackFutures gave the CoLab cohort free access to key suppliers, Highlight and VoxPopMe, to execute quantitative and qualitative research. “As a small company, we never would have been able to invest in these big data projects.”

This research directly resulted in a stronger brand hierarchy for Chasin’ Dreams Farm, and informed a creative brief that’s in use now on a packaging refresh project. Their entire rebrand as “the tiniest, biggest snack in the world” came from countless meetings with Mondelēz’s creative agency. “Normally, when we work with a creative agency and we’re pouring in a lot of our resources, our creativity is stifled by the need for a reasonable, actionable outcome. With this team, we were able to get really creative without that financial pressure,” says Chasin. The synthesis of the primary and secondary research and data helped create three brand stories for Chasin’ Dreams Farm: one for investors, retailers, and consumers.

Another benefit Chasin got from the program was the relationships she foraged with other founders in the class. Mondelēz made a point to give founders time to bond. During in-person sessions, several hours were left unscheduled so the founders had time to learn from each other. Chasin describes leaving the program with “lifelong friends in this program through a shared love of CPG.”

The Mondelēz team opened their network of agencies as well as their internal teams to work with the founders. Chasin describes feeling that her brand was incredibly valued by the Mondelēz team: “They went above and beyond to help us understand the opportunities ahead.” Chasin views it as “the start of the relationship, and we’re thrilled with the experience we had.”

APPLY FOR 2022

Applications for the CoLab 2022 program are open now through December at www.snackfutures.com, and the program begins in April of 2022. To apply, start-ups must be based in the U.S., generating at least $500,000 in revenue, have high growth potential, align with the Mondelēz International innovation priorities and can benefit from working with the company. The second year of our CoLab startup engagement program will focus specifically on mission-driven brands that can demonstrate their commitment to having a positive impact on social, environmental and human well-being.