Statistics on the much-loved, continually-growing snack foods category in the natural and conventional markets
Who’s going to argue with a tasty snack? Not American consumers, apparently. The snack foods category—including salty snacks like pretzels and chips, sweet snacks like cookies, as well as energy bars, jerky and other treats—is seeing huge growth.
$760 million: Total sales of natural chips, pretzels and related snacks in 2010, up almost 11 percent from 2009. $117 million of this amount was sold at naturals stores
300: Cookies consumed per person, per year in the United States. Nabisco’s Oreo remains the best-selling and most-imitated cookie, with more than 500 billion cookies sold since its invention in 1912—enough to reach to the moon and back six times
18 percent: Increase in sales of natural energy bars and gels between 2009 and 2010. Total sales of these products in all channels: $535 million
40 million: Total units of natural candy and individual snacks sold in the naturals channel for the year ending October 2010, up 11.9 percent over the previous year
1.5: Pounds of pretzels consumed per person, per year in the U.S.