Product Autopsy: Kudos Bars (1986 - 2017)
Consumers are a lot more savvy since the 1990s about what products are purportedly healthy vs. actually healthy. Consequently the scrutiny of consumers has led to the demise or updating of many of our favorite snacks that peaked in the 1990s. One snack category we have seen the most evolution of in the last 30-35 years is the energy or snack bar. In 2023, the global snack bar market size reached $26.8 billion and is expected to reach $41.1 billion by 2032.
So why did a snack bar as popular as the Kudos Bar eventually fail?
Like most products that had a noteworthy heyday, they eventually did not match up with the trends consumers were interested in. There was a time when the Kudos bar was marketed as fuel to play sports - with the focus on sugar intake and its negative impacts on health, the Kudos bar could now be seen for what it really was, a candy bar. Honestly Mars bowing out the Kudos bar line was likely the better choice than trying to re-invent a candy bar as something healthy.
While the Mars company never made a statement as to why they discontinued the product, we are going to perform a product autopsy to understand why the Kudos bar was both popular and why it likely was discontinued.
The “Healthy” Bar
Like Snackwell Cookies, Kudos Bars were in that category of snacks that made you ‘feel’ like you were making a healthy choice. A granola bar was seen as a great add to your diet - it was low in fat, high in fiber - in the case of the Kudos bar, they enticed you with enrobing it in chocolate and peanut butter.
These bars were not necessarily directly labeled as healthy, but granola bars were synonymous with hiking, sports, and breakfast. Whether the marketing directly suggested their use at breakfast or not, we know these kinds of bars were popular as an on-the-go option for many busy consumers running out the door in the morning.
At SmarterSlice, we refer to this as ‘Indirect Positioning’ (via brand association). You can imply your product is for breakfast by placing it next to images or products associated with breakfast. By doing so, you link your product to the broader breakfast lifestyle image, even if you haven't explicitly connected your brand to it. This is a helpful tool to build your product’s identity, however the FTC does see this as something to regulate. For instance, if you tread too closely to a health claim through Indirect Position - insinuating your product offers a specific health benefit, you better have the evidence to back the claim.
In 2011, Mars got even more aggressive in turning these granola bars into candy bars. They incorporated some of their favorite candies into Kudos - offering M&M, Snickers, and Dove versions. At this point, how any one was convinced these were healthy is beyond me. Perhaps this innovation was them finally admitting that these were candy bars? Not really, in fact they added more calcium and 20% more peanuts. Arguably this move was a waste, as consumers are savvy enough to know that extra calcium and some protein from peanuts doesn’t counteract the added sugar from candy pieces.
The Turning Point
We can’t exactly pinpoint a year in which Mars saw their Kudos Bars lose steam, but we know the obesity crisis in the U.S. took a major turn. According to the CDC, from 1999 - 2000 through 2017 - March 2020, US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 41.9%. During the same time, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.
The media was reporting on these scary health statistics regularly, and American consumers were taking a bigger interest in what was in their food. Sugar had been thriving when fat was the enemy, but now research was showing that sugar had led the average weight of an American to skyrocket.
We can’t blame all of this on Kudos Bars of course, but we can look at this climate and see why products like this were seeing a decline in consumption. Instead, health-culture as a whole was pivoting, and the Kudos Bar was one of the unlucky products designed for previous headwinds
and now left without a customer base when those winds changed.
Could Mars have saved Kudos Bar?
Mars’ choice to discontinue the Kudos bar was probably the best option at the time. Significant change to the bars to make them actually healthy would have left them unrecognizable. Moving categories to sell them as candy bars either would have been unsuccessful or cannibalized their own candy bar sales. Afterall, who wants to pick the granola based candy bar when you can have a more indulgent candy bar with the same nutrition?
For the sake of analysis, let’s chat about what they could have done to improve the nutrition of the bars:
Could they have explored non-nutritive sweeteners?
Yes, they could have considered exploring zero-calorie sweeteners to reduce the overall added sugar - however Kudos bars were very inexpensive. This would have driven up their cost of goods, and probably would have squeezed out their target consumer. Today monk fruit, stevia, and allulose are widely used and prices are more reasonable so maybe it would have been a different outcome in 2024? Hard to say since the market is full of even more competitors now and arguably their popular candy-based flavors wouldn’t have benefited from that sugar swap.
Could they have focused on fiber?
While fiber is incredibly important and most Americans aren’t getting enough, adding more fiber to a bar with so much added sugar probably wouldn’t have saved them.
Could they have added protein?
I would argue this may have worked to make them relevant for a little while. Many protein bars on the market now still tout a high sugar content. If they had incorporated some whey protein or milk protein it could have appealed to consumers as a slightly better for you candy option. It would have required some thoughtful positioning and re-marketing to a new set of consumers.
Autopsy Results
While I wouldn’t consider Kudos Bars “good” from a health perspective, they were pretty “good” from a taste perspective. Looking at the bar market today, things aren’t THAT different in the bar aisle - while brands aren’t putting candy pieces in their bars some of the sugar content still suggests they identify as candy bars. With the popularization of sugar alcohols and natural zero-calorie sweeteners, sugar content in bars has decreased but I am not sure I would label these as healthy, nonetheless.
We can only really speculate about what failed in terms of the Kudos bar’s marketing as those efforts are lost in an archive not found on the internet. So we leave you with our thoughts regarding what went wrong from the nutritional and cultural perspective.
The Kudos Bar is in a graveyard along with 100’s of other bars that didn’t make it to today - but with the levels of competition in that category it’s no surprise. We can learn what did not work for the Kudos Bar in the specific time period it existed, but it unfortunately doesn’t tell us the magic recipe for success to survive today.
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