Photo courtesy of Breyers.
Breyers just copied Halo Top's entire playbook to develop a new set of frozen ice creams.
Their new "Breyers delights" are low-calorie, high-protein ice creams where the calories per pint are displayed more prominently than the logo in a design nearly identical to Halo Top's. Breyers is starting out with four flavors: Mint Chip, Vanilla Bean, Cookies & Cream, and Creamy Chocolate, all of which have begun to make their way into select retailers already. The company told Foodbeast that a nationwide launch of their new ice cream is scheduled for August.
Halo Top has been having some major success with their business model and marketing, something that was discussed in last week's Foodbeast's podcast, The Katchup.
People have been loving that they can know the calories they'll be consuming straight away and feel less guilty about crushing an entire pint of Halo Top than they would if it was normal ice cream. According to Ad Age, that's translated to a 2500% bump in sales from 2015-2016, with over 13.5 million pints sold for a total of $66.1 million. While that pales in comparison to Breyers' $500 million in U.S. ice cream sales for 2016, any company would be amazed by that insane level of growth.
Akin to the Instagram vs. Snapchat tech beef, Breyers is unabashedly making their product similar to the Halo Top ice cream. Most explicit is the front-and-center caloric branding on the front of the pint.
It's pretty clear that Breyers has caught onto what Halo Top has originated, and they want to get in on the now trendy low-cal protein ice cream action. What's interesting here is the timing of the release of the Breyers Delights. Breyers has the ability to mimic Halo Top at any time, so why now? A strong reason could be that Halo Top is finally beginning to make its way into major retailers like Walmart and getting bought up faster than Amazon shares.
With that level of success, Breyers is hoping to capitalize on the new low-cal, high-protein ice cream trend and flex their muscle in this new category. As a major ice cream brand, they have the distribution capability to potentially challenge Halo Top for the top spot in the protein ice cream section, giving Halo Top some serious competition they haven't had to worry about before.
Breyers jumping on the Halo Top bandwagon may mean the high-protein ice cream aisle is about to get a little more crowded, however. But hey, if it's as delicious as Halo Top, we're all for it.
UPDATE: We tried it, it's pretty solid. Learn more about how we felt about it by listening to the last few minutes of The Katchup podcast above.
