Food Firms’ PB&J; Hybrids Relive Wonder Years

Food makers are gambling big that grown-ups crave a return to the gooey comfort combo of their youth, peanut butter and jelly.

Kansas City, Mo.-based Russell Stover Candies has introduced chocolate-covered peanut butter and jelly cups and is launching a $16-million promotional campaign built around the slogan “Don’t you wish you could be a kid again?”

The nostalgia appears to be, well, spreading.

Procter & Gamble brought out a new line of Jif peanut butters mixed with fruit and chocolate this summer, backed by an ad that shows Dad getting caught eating the stuff after Mom bought it for the kids.

East of Chicago Pizza, an Eastern chain, now offers PB&J; as a topping. Peanut Butter & Co., an 8-month-old New York eatery, has a menu of nothing but peanut butter sandwiches--including, of course, the Elvis (grilled, drizzled with honey, stuffed with bananas).

The success of their efforts hangs on the childhood memories embedded in baby boomers’ taste buds, on what Russell Stover executives call peanut butter and jelly “moments”: Think Brady Bunch lunch boxes, laughter-filled days spent getting gum out of friends’ pigtails and late-night, high-fat refrigerator raids.

“I don’t think the time could be better to play on the emotional or romantic feelings of baby boomers,” said Brian Berish, Russell Stover’s vice president of marketing. “As we get older, we think back on the past as a simpler, better time, and ours is a product that can keep you in the moment.”

Much rides on Russell Stover’s ability to evoke warm fuzzies: Though the company dominates the boxed candy market, its PB&J; cups represent its first attempt to enter the far richer candy bar arena.

But product pundits are already predicting that few of the new PB&J; hybrids will stick.

“It’s a fad,” said Lynn Dornblaser, editorial director of New Product News. The Russell Stover candies will last two to three years and then fade, she predicted.

Even if their appeal expires before that case of Skippy you’ve squirreled away to survive Y2K, the burst of new products may provide a much-needed boost to sales of peanut butter, jelly and jam, which have been flat or down for several years, ACNielsen data show.

A well-publicized scare about potentially life-threatening allergies to peanuts and peanut butter prompted airlines to stop serving peanuts and schools to ban the PB&J; sandwich from their menus.

Changing demographics and diet concerns didn’t help, either.

“We’ve had 10 years of declining numbers of school-age children,” said Mitch Head, executive director of the Peanut Advisory Board, a trade association run by peanut farmers. “Plus, with all the concern about fat, peanut butter became this forbidden food that everyone loved but avoided.”

Russell Stover, Jif and the other peanut butter entrepreneurs are betting that remembered pleasure can make grown-ups forget about their waistlines. They have set about reclaiming a lost generation of adults who stopped eating the spread after college.

“Peanut butter now is where coffee was 10 years ago,” said Lee Zalven, Peanut Butter & Co.’s 26-year-old founder. “I’m positioning myself to be the Starbucks of the peanut butter world.”

Not every attempt to reach consumers’ inner children works.

Ben & Jerry’s introduced a PB&J; flavor in 1996, only to see it fail within six months.

“It even had a little Wonder bread in it,” said Mary Kamm, the company’s research and development director. She blamed the product’s flop mostly on its fall, back-to-school release, which missed out on the summer surge in ice cream sales.

“The other thing that might have killed us was we used strawberry jam instead of grape jelly.”

Russell Stover hasn’t fallen into that hole: It partnered with Welch’s, the nation’s premier maker of grape jelly--all part of a strategy designed to make consumers embrace a new product like an old favorite.

Armed with a company-commissioned study in which consumers ranked peanut butter and jelly fifth among their favorite foods and two-thirds confessed they continue to eat the sandwiches into adulthood, Russell Stover says its PB&J; cups are no novelty.

The company is projecting annual sales of between $75 million and $100 million for the new line.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Spreading Its Appeal

New peanut butter products are targeting adults in an effort to boost sales of peanut butter, which have been flat or down in the last few years. Sales in millions:

Fiscal 1999: $818 million

Note: Figures are for 52-week fiscal years that end in mid-July.

Source: ACNielsen.