"It’s old…  It’s cold…  It’s hot again"

First it was 60’s music.  Then is was cigars and martinis.  Now the baby boomers – and marketers – have made candy the latest retro trend.  You may not be able to afford a vintage Harley, but couldn’t you go for a Lola right about now?

What do people do to satisfy an oddball food craving?  Some may rummage through their kitchens, run to the corner store or drive to the supermarket.  Others, such as Tony Romanelli, start their own business.

On a summer’s day about two years ago, Romanelli was sitting around with some friends when he heard himself saying, “What I wouldn’t do for a Lola.”  A Lola Iceberg – as Romanelli remember it – was a double handful of fruit-flavoured liquid contained in a squeezable, waxed cardboard pyramid.  But as far as Romanelli could tell, Lolas could not be found anywhere.  Wondering what had caused them to vanish from the shelves, he called his friend John Daniele, a marketing consultant.  Their research showed that the original Lolas were made by a Toronto-based company and sold from 1959 to 1982, and only in Southern Ontario and Quebec.  Further research confirmed that Lolas had been very popular within their limited market, and that the original company had closed down for family reasons, rather that any falloff in sales.

In 1995 Daniele and Romanelli decided to bring back the Lola.  They hired a lawyer, looked up the product name in a library registry, then reregistered the expired Lola trademark and formed Lola Beverages Inc.  To promote the revival of Lolas, Romanelli and Daniele have started out slowly.  At first, there were only the two of them in the Woodbridge, Ont. Office, with Romanelli still continuing work on his water-sealant construction company.  Recently, Lola Beverages has added a marketing manager.

The partners spent $30,000 on their May 1996 test launch, mostly on posters and product giveaways.  They milked their product’s grassroots appeal by appearing at a slate of local events – the Molson Indy, the Toronto Jazz Fest, Caribana, the Toronto Air Show – and even showed up at smaller events such as high-school track meets.  That bought them about $50,000 in sales, and a lot of publicity.  This year they have already shown up at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children Telethon and at several East Seals events.

This relatively cheap publicity has served Lola Beverages well.  Not only has it established a very good name for itself, but the company has also brought in $150,000 in sales in May 1997 alone – a very high number considering May’s chilly weather and the fact that it was Lola Beverages’ first real month of sales.  Daniele and Romanelli are hoping they will triple that figure in June, and are expecting to make a total of $2.5 million in sales by the end of summer.  According to Daniele, “All for a Lola!” has become an unofficial office battle cry, playing on the fact that it was because of one man’s craving that so much effort has been put into rebuilding an obscure, old company.

The story of Lola Beverages, as quirky as it may be, is indicative of a more far-reaching trend.  The mid-to late ‘90s have witnessed the aging generation of baby boomers returning to what is old and comfortable.  Boomers have been frequenting cigar bars, buying Harleys, watching the Graduate on the big screen and visiting commemorative rock’n’roll sites in droves.  The retro trend has also infiltrate youth culture, with 20-somethings suddenly sporting cats-eye shades and bell bottoms.  And for those of you nostalgic for other candies and snacks of your youth, welcome to the world of custom-made Pez, family-pack Lik-m-aid Fun Dip and adult candy stores that stay open until 3 a.m.

Snacks and candy products are perhaps the perfect medium for “retro” marketing.  As nostalgic purchases go, snack foods are both inexpensive and unobtrusive.  A 45-year-old might not replace her minivan with a T-Bird convertible, or trade in her business suit for a poodle skirt, but she can sure go and gorge herself on Mackintosh’s Creamy Toffee or Gobstoppers.  Within the $235-billion Canadian snack food industry, the retro trend has manifested itself through brand revivals of kitschy confections such as Lolas or Pixy Stix and through tried-and-true brands such as Mackintosh’s Creamy Toffee and Bits & Bites, which have always sold relatively well with a minimal amount of money spent on advertising.  If a company is to invest in a product, retro brands with lower marketing costs and zero R& D can take that money the furthest.  Once expanded, these brands can make a lot of money, and can even begin to infiltrate new markets.  The managers behind Bits & Bites and Lolas are talking about expanding into the US in the next two years.

While there is not double that candies, icicles and party snacks are primarily children’s products, efforts to revitalize old brands are directed at those who are old enough to remember them – namely, the adults who stock the kitchen cupboards.  According to Blair Neuss, marketing manager for Willy Wonka products at Nestlé Canada Inc., the primary target is still children aged 5 to 14, but a large secondary target is the secret users.  “The biggie that has gone beyond the youth and teen market is SweeTARTS rolls,” he says with a laugh, “meaning that moms and pops buy them and then secretly shove them into their own pockets.”  Jane Mackasey, director of confectionery at Nestlé, which makes Coffee Crisp, Aero and Mackintosh toffee, says that the key to retro marketing is adult consumer behavior, which is both sentimental and conservative.  “Customers have a menu of maybe five brands that they keep rotating and never get sick of,” she says.  “People are very emotional about their candy.”

While it might be cheaper to revive a favourite old brand, multinationals naturally tend to favor new products with splashy, expensive launches.  This is the kind of typical corporate thinking that Ryan Mugford, a brand manager at Toronto-based Christie Brown & Co., a subsidiary of Nabisco Ltd. Of Etobicoke, Ont., decided to change.  A few years ago, he took on the Canadian Bits & Bites brand as his own personal undertaking.  Bits & Bites are Nabisco’s version of “nuts and bolts,” a grab bag of nuts, pretzels and Shreddies cereal cooked up with some salt and a dash of Worcestershire sauce that has become the staple snack of the Canadian Christmas.  Mugford was encouraged by market research he conducted in 1995 that showed that in Canada, Bits & Bites had good brand equity and 83% brand awareness – a surprisingly high percentage for a product that had not been promoted or advertised at all since 1978.  It had survived for almost 20 years on name alone.

Mugford, it should be said, has become something of Bits & Bites zealot.  About two-and-a-half years ago, he took the stagnating brand under his wing.  Now he speaks with an almost paternal air of Bits & Bites as “the scrappy little brand that has found its niche for the second time.”  Having limited capital to work with, Mugford started his quest by riding the coattails of the bigger brands – for example, engaging in a 79c Coca-Cola/Bits & Bites cross promotion at Esso gas stations.  In 1996 Mugford took a deeper plunge and spent $100,000 on redesigning the old packaging to something that is more convenient (resealable, stand-up pouches) but still familiar.  The new packages hit the selves in October 1996 with great success.  This year’s project is to get Bits & Bites back on the air.  But instead of filming an entirely new commercial spot, Nabisco is using footage from the original commercial and digitally scanning in an image of the new package.  The entire production, including a new French-language version, will cost only about $20,000.

The animated spot already was considered to be campy-retro when it aired briefly in 1978; in 1997, it seems to be almost a parody.  A cartoon figure of a suburban dad reaches out an enormous hand filled with Bits & Bites.  He settles into a lawn chair in a Leave It to Beaver setting and tells the audience all about Bits & Bites in the kind of syrupy, mellow voice Bing Crosby would have had if he had grown up in Canadian backyards.  Considering that Bits & Bites is being marketed on nostalgia, Mugford is not even going to attempt to superbrand slickness.  “If everyone else is screaming with a supermodel,” he says, “we’ll whisper with an old, cartoon-guy day.”

Over the past two-and-a-half years, Mugford has spent less than $500,000 on all advertising and promotions of the brand; however, while net sales of Bits & Bites hovered around the $3.5 million mark for 10-odd years, that figure doubled in the past 18 months.  And while this still might not comprise a huge share of the salty-snack market, Mugford remains confident: “We know that we are not going to beat Frito Lay’s, so we’ll carve out our own little niche.”  (Perhaps Mugford is being just a bit coy.  In the last quarter of 1996 Bits & Bites out-sold Baked Lay’s in sales, both in terms of the two brands’ top flavors and in total sales.  How’s that for a scrappy little brand?)

Nestlé’s Mackasey agrees that the subtle revamping of old products – whether through new packaging, new marketing or line extensions – is often a better use of money that launching a new product altogether.  “If you look at the top 10 brands of 20 years ago, they are more or less the same brands,” she says.  “There have not been a lot of very successful, totally new product launches in the past 10 years.”  Indeed, many manufacturers and marketers have gone out of their way to retain the integrity of original products and packaging – or at least some sense of antiquity.  Take for example, the Canadian-founded O-Pee-Chee Co. Ltd., which has products (including Lik-m-aid Fun Dip and SweeTARTS) that probably take the cake for maintaining the most authentic pre-60s flavor.  After Nestlé bought the rights to the O-Pee-Chee name in 1996, there was debate about whether O-Pee-Chee’s or Nestlé’s name would go on the candies packages.  A compromise was reached: all products would become Willy Wonka products – a Nestlé line names after the elfin hero of the 1964 children’s book by Ronald Dahl.  But none of the products will really change.  Gobstoppers will still be incredibly hard to chew and Pixy Stix will still come in a brightly coloured, flimsy paper straw.

For Daniele and Romanelli, reviving the original Lola and its weird packaging took more effort than most archeological digs.  Their first impediment was that the original Lola recipe was lost.  They hunted down a flavors company that had worked with the original Lola makers, and then recreated the recipe as best they could.  After that, their main obstacle was the packaging.  Daniele and Romanelli did not want to spend the capital needed to buy their own packaging equipment, and finding manufacturer that still packaged liquids in tetrahedral pyramids was difficult.  They quickly found out that in the whole world there are only four plants and three companies that could fulfill their needs.  After ruling out Europe and South Africa, they settled on Mexico.  “The uniqueness of the Lola is in the packaging.”

For other companies, reviving products has necessitated a few political adjustments.  Popeye Cigarettes have been rechristened Popey Candy Sticks, although they still have their dyed fiery-red ends.  Triple C-Imports Ltd.’s “Chicago” candy cigarettes similarly have been changed to “confectionery sticks.”  Penny candy is still carried in corner stores, but many of the offensive nicknames, often based on racial stereotypes, are no longer used.  And, in a shrewd reading of the market, Nestlé added a line extension to its very successful Macintosh’s Creamy Toffee – a softer recipe that is easier on kid’s teeth and on aging dental work.

It’s 4 p.m. in the Toronto offices of Manifest Communications Inc., a social marketing firm.  The work at the office is serious, so when employees take time out from promoting such worthy organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, they don’t break for coffee.  They break for candy.

“It started off as a random thing.  I brought candy to the office one day and people really thought it was great,” explains Mark Sarner, the company’s president.  “And now the company pays for candy twice a week.”  The office morale booster has even been institutionalized with its own candy manager and candy bowl filled with Jujubes and Rosebuds.  “That basic consumer candy, not high-end candy, has become an adult thing is very interesting,” Sarner says.  “It is part of a return to comfort foods as an acceptable indulgence.”

The loot for the candy bowl comes from Toronto’s Sugar Mountain Confectionary Co. chain.  These retro-candy specialty outlets were the brainchild of ex-street vendor Sean McCann, who used to sell Pez and Bazooka bubblegum on the corner of Queen and Beverly in downtown Toronto, McCann has opened three stores in as many years, and is looking for an investor to help him open more.  McCann seems to run his stores solely on good old-fashioned sense.  Relying on neither marketing surveys, a specific target audience nor a professional buyer, McCann rather bases his decisions on consumer input.  In response to his customers, he juggles more than 35 candy distributors and stay open until 3 a.m. for the club kids hanging out in the city’s fashion district.

Sugar Mountain’s outlet on Richmond Street (the one favored by Manifest Communications) is a fire engine red cottage decorated with huge candy logos.  On most afternoons, it is filled with “suits.”  Inside are three rooms, all packed to the ceiling, like a 50’s candy counter gone wild.  Buckets of Popey Candy Sticks, Bottle Caps and candy necklaces line the walls.  The back room is devoted to bulk candy – crammed with several dozen buckets sporting hug shovels for picking up Tart ‘N’ Tiny candies, Black Balls, Gummi Worms and Swedish Berries.  The store’s side room is set up as a Pez shrine, with dispensers (starring the Flintstones, Peanuts and Looney Toons characters) lining three walls.  And there are crates of Lolas stacked everywhere.  McCann expects his three Sugar Mountain stores t o sell about 250,000 Lolas this summer.

There is one major difference between the retro snacks of today and their 60s progenitors: price.  Mackintosh’s Creamy Toffee, Bits & Bites, Lolas and even O-Pee-Chee products are no longer retailed as penny candies, but neither are they as expensive as high-end adult-only snacks.  A 227-gram Lola, for example, cost 79¢ to 85¢, more expensive that a 30¢ Mr. Freezie, but still cheaper than a frozen fruit-juice bar.  Nerds, Runts and SweeTARTS rolls usually run 69¢, and a Pez dispenser with three refills is a whopping $1.99.  (Special Pez outfits, so that you can couple Mickey Mouse’s head with a skeleton or a naked male torso, sell for about $2,99).  A 225-gram bag of Bits & Bites snack mix is about $2.99, roughly the same price as a package of Smart-Food popcorn, Ritz crackers or Snackewells, but significantly more expensive that a bag of Doritos ($1.99) or generic pretzels ($1.49).

Not only are these products adult-priced, but a major step in reviving many of these brand has been the expansion of distribution to include supermarkets, where baby boomers sho for themselves and for their own kids.  Mackintosh’s Creamy Toffee, Lik-m-aid, Pixy Stix, Lolas and Bits & Bites are now all available in major supermarket chains – sometimes even in budge six-packs.  A 200-gram bag of bite-sized mint-flavored Mackintosh’s toffee is $2.49; a Lola take-home six-pack, available at IGA and A&P, cost $3.99.  Shrewd marketing, but don’t completely discount the sentimental power of a little sugar, flour and food coloring.  “Pixy Stix have seen a reemergence in sales.  A lot of stores have relisted the product,” says Neuss.  “You know why?  Because retail buyers remember eating Pixy Stix too.”