Crisp company lure kids with healthy snacks

The company are collaborating with UK retailer Tesco in a deal worth almost £500,000 (€738,500) which saw the product go on sale in Tesco Extra stores throughout Britain this week.

While UK crisp sales declined by 9 per cent between 2002 and 2005, market analysts Leatherhead report that the fruit snack market is set to take off with a predicted global market worth £1.62bn (€17.8bn) by 2010.

This has prompted snack firms to explore healthier options - balancing the need to provide nutritional benefits with reaching younger consumers who are typically drawn to high salt and sugar foods.

Each packet of the Snapz crisps contains two whole apples and counts as one of the five recommended fruit and vegetable portions.

The multipacks contain five packets in orange, banana, strawberry and blackcurrant flavours. The company is hoping they will prove a popular choice in the children's lunchbox snack market as well as attracting adult consumers.

Snapz managing director Bahram Ajodani said: "If we gain just one per cent of the market share for crisp sales we will give over 350,000 people a day the option of a healthier crisp.​

"Britons love crisps, so rather than trying to break that habit, we are keen to offer people different options as we already do with customers in America, Spain and Japan."​

Crisps have been suffering from bad press recently with an advert released in the UK by the British Heart Foundation claiming that one in five UK children, between the ages of eight and 15, ate two or more packets of crisps a day. A statistic that the charity claims is equivalent to 'drinking' at least nine litres of oil a year.

Consumer organizations such as Which? have also been vociferous in raising awareness of the nutritional disadvantages of crisp consumption.

And manufacturers have become aware of the need to adapt to a changing market, with children's crisp leader Walkers rolling out baked and lower fat varieties.