Sugar-free Funday out to lick lollipop rivals
Funday, the sugar-free sweet company, is tapping into a booming appetite for healthy snacks and reporting triple-digit growth year-on-year for its natural sugar sweets.
Funday Natural Sweets, the sugar-free lolly company, is taking on confectionery giant Chupa Chups with the launch of a low-sugar lollipop.
The Melbourne-based brand, which boasts a range of sweets containing no added sugar or artificial sweeteners, has added lollipops to its collection in a bid to provide consumers with a healthier alternative. The Funday lollipop has just 1g of sugar versus other brands, including Chupa Chups which have around 10g.
To promote its new product, Funday has rolled out an ad campaign spruiking the five-star health rating on its lollipop, while pointing to the 0.5 star rating held by other brands. The cheeky campaign is part of the brand’s mission to disrupt the confectionery category and take on big sugar, according to Funday Natural Sweets founder Daniel Kitay.
Funday has sold more than 10 million bags of sweets in the past 12 months and will report “a substantial increase on those volumes” in the next year. If the early lollipop sales are anything to go by, the brand is on a significant roll with a lollipop being sold every two and half seconds.
“We’re selling a million lollipops a month and we’ve only really just started getting it to market,” Mr Kitay said. “We have seriously high ambitions for how we can flip the category on its head.”
The brand, which is stocked in 7000 stores including Chemist Warehouse and Woolworths, and which launches in Coles this month, has reported triple-digit growth each year since it began trading five years ago.
“We are in hyper growth mode, but we’re doing it in a responsible way,“ Mr Kitay said. “We’ve got three manufacturers globally, we’ve got five packing sites to maintain the level of quality and keep up with the demand.
“We are going into our fifth trading year, so from a brand perspective, we are in our infancy and relative to big multinationals, very few people know about Funday in the market. But we’re doing such amazing numbers and I think where we have a lot of optimism within the business is like, if we ever match one of the multinationals, and it will happen over time, the business is being set up for massive explosive growth. We are continuing to grow and our budgets are substantially higher for this financial year.”
It comes as the confectionery giants battle with shifting food trends as people become more conscious of the foods they eat, particularly with a focus on low-sugar and sugar free diets and the rise of GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic.
“We are in a new era of food, the GLP-1s have kicked off and are only going to become more prominent. Interestingly, products like chocolate are going to see a decline, but products like Funday offer a sweet hit without making people feel nauseous or sick,” Mr Kitay said. “We’re already seeing a huge increase in people coming to us saying they are on a weight-loss journey with GLP-1 and are using Funday to keep them going through the day.
“Gone are the days where people seek out indulgence at all cost. Now food has to taste good and also do good for you. People are rejecting ultra processed sugar filled products that don’t align with the modern values of health and people want to consciously snack.”
Mr Kitay said Funday’s products which feature prebiotics and dietary fibre, in addition to being gluten free and vegan, tick a lot of boxes with modern consumers – and not just in Australia. The brand is sold in Singapore and Middle East countries including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Funday has recently launched on Amazon in the US where it is going “really well” and Mr Kitay is in discussions with US distributors and retailers with the hope of trialling the brand in stores.
“We’ve done a lot of global analysis around ‘better for you’ confectionary players and we feel the US is a prime market for Funday. We feel that we can actually offer that market something that they don’t have access to. We’re really keen to test the concept out and see whether it resonates as strongly as it does in Australia.”
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