Andrew Athias, a 28-year-old social media manager from Cherry Hill, NJ, bought a box of new peanut butter cups early – he has TikTok and Instagram accounts dedicated to his love for Reese’s – and described him as “very tasty”.
“As someone who is known for eating peanut butter on a spoon – and I know there are a lot of people who do that – it tastes the same,” he said. “It’s like eating two types of peanut butter at the same time. It’s subtle. “
Companies periodically launch new products to garner advertising and sales, sometimes testing consumers’ tolerance for variety. Oreo, in the last decade, introduced limited edition flavors like Jelly Donut, Mississippi Mud Pie, Swedish Fish and Watermelon. Watermelon was widely seen as a failure.
Silvia Bellezza, associate professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, said that brands, and especially established brands that have been around for a long time, offer new approaches to the classics to see if new items will become popular and to keep brands’ visibility.
“It’s important to keep them excited, to keep the discussion going, to have something new on the shelves,” she said. “Once you have that asset in people’s minds, which costs money and time, you try to make the most of it.”
The fact that Hershey feels it could get rid of chocolate signals the company’s view that peanut butter is the product’s “hero”, she said. (Although it has lost chocolate, the new Reese’s still contains hydrogenated vegetable oil, corn syrup and several other ingredients.)
Hershey has experienced it before. Last month, it launched organic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in milk and dark chocolate, an attempt to divert competition from a number of smaller companies, such as Trader Joe’s, which sells a glass of dark chocolate peanut butter, and Justin’s, a company based in Colorado that sells best organic peanuts and almond butter cups.