Grabanzos: Changing the way we crunch

The challenge

Our target audience is young adults and adults who are looking for a smarter way to eat their chocolate. They are generally health conscious, but have a sweet tooth and will slip from their planned diet and binge on sweet foods, then feel guilty afterwards. Currently in the chocolate snack market, there is a dearth of options that both taste good and are good for you. In the customer discovery we have conducted, we identified two existing categories that lie on opposite sides of the spectrum. The first is the “tastes good, bad for you” category (malt balls, chocolate wafer snacks, chocolate covered pretzels). These taste good, but because they are made of nutritionally empty ingredients (simple carbohydrates from wheat and sugars) they do not fill you up and you end up overeating and feeling guilty afterwards. The second is the “better-for-you, tastes healthy” category (chocolate covered chickpeas, healthy chocolates, etc.). While these may be a lot better for you, they are not satisfying and do not give you the same indulgent experience as conventional chocolates.

The solution

Grabanzos are a chocolate covered chickpea snack that both taste good and are better-for-you. The long-term goal of our company is to make eating better taste better. We see a huge opportunity for this in the category of crunchy foods. Most crunchy foods are made with wheat, rice, or potato. With our dough technology, we seek to replace these with more nutritionally dense ingredients that can produce the same crunch. Right now we focus on the chickpea and chocolate, but plan to explore additional legumes and savory snacks. Grabanzos have been designed by food scientists. This enables us to do what our competitors do not - we can make food that (1) tastes good and (2) is better-for-you. Other crunchy chocolate snacks deliver on flavor, but are made of nutritionally empty ingredients. Better-for-you chickpea snacks that are emerging in CPG today are more nutritionally conscious, but do not deliver on flavor - they very clearly taste like chickpeas. As food scientists, our knowledge of ingredients, flavors, and food processes give us an edge over the competition as we create foods that can taste as indulgent as a candy bar but you don’t feel guilty about eating them.