Utz Brands‘ competitors in salty snacks include PepsiCo (Frito Lay), Campbell’s (Snyder’s-Lance), Kellogg’s (Pringles), General Mills, Grupo Bimbo, Hershey’s, Hain Celestial and Arca Continental (Wise).
The company is a leading manufacturer, marketer and distributor of high quality brand name snack products in the United States.
More than anything else, Utz Brands produces a wide offering of savory snacks, including fries, pretzels, cheese snacks, veggie snacks, pork skins, pub/party mixes, and other snacks.
Their products also compete with the salty snacks of their own brands or retailers.
However, private label accounted for only about 5% of the category’s retail sales in 2020, which was flat compared to its share of retail sales in 2013.
Salty snacks
Historically, the salty snacks category has benefited from favorable competitive dynamics, including low penetration from private labels and category leaders who compete primarily through marketing and innovation.
Utz Brands highlighted that it is the second brand platform in its main geographies, which represents 9% of the total retail sales of the salty snacks category.
As of January 3, 2021, in its main geographies, it had the first position 1 in pork skins, with 27% of the retail sales of the sub-category and the second position in French fries, pretzels and cheese sandwiches, with 15, 20 and 9% of the subcategory’s retail sales, respectively.
With the acquisition of OTB, as of December 14, 2020, Utz Brands occupies the third position of brand with tortillas, with a 4 percent share.
The company believes that it has a strong and defensible position in its core geographies with a significant opportunity to improve its national position by expanding sales in expanding geographies (where it represents 4.5% of the category’s retail sales) and emerging geographies (where we represent 2.5% of the sales of the category).
Notably, in 2020, roughly $ 2.3 billion in salty snack retail sales were generated by roughly 1,300 smaller competitors, each with retail sales of less than $ 200 million.
From Utz Brands’ perspective, this fragmented group of smaller brands provides an attractive opportunity to expand your retail sales, either by acquiring or displacing smaller regional or specific product competitors.
