FoodBev talks to Danny Lowe, the founder and director of Blockhead, which is thinking differently about the confectionery category with its vitamin and energy gum.
The company currently has two offerings – peppermint-flavoured energy gum and lemon-flavoured vitamin gum – and, as Lowe explains, the company is exploring new formats, such as calming confectionery, which could come as early as next year.
“There’s so many opportunities that we can look at within gum,” he says. “At the moment we’re looking at the calming market – something for just if you want to chill out or rest, with the amount of stress that people are under nowadays. It’s not just chewing gum we’re interested in: it’s confectionery in general.”
With a rising focus on functional confectionery as an alternative to pills and supplements, it’s an area that is primed for growth.
“I was studying sports science at university and I was actually learning about getting things into the body quickly. [Blockhead] started life as a mouthwash, so it was this high-sugar, high-caffeine mouthwash that you swirled round your mouth for five minutes and spat it out, which was really grim in a number of different ways.
“But I found that quite interesting as a concept, for getting a quick boost, because you were absorbing these ingredients through glands underneath your tongue called the buccal mucosa, which is a really quick way of getting things into the body. From there, I got thinking about ideas, and started developing the energy gum. We put caffeine and vitamins in it – mostly caffeine, because it’s one of the only things actually shown to have an actual performance benefit to it.
“I started working with a manufacturer on that, and in my final year of uni received the first batch of samples.”
Lowe also explains the origins of the brand’s rather unique name, Blockhead.
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Presented by: Alex Clere Edited by: Harriet Jachec
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024
