Name: Why Haribo Refuses to Expand Beyond Gummies | WSJ The Economics Of
Uploaded: 2025-08-08T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 6 min 9 s
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When you open a bag of Haribo gold bears in the U.S., you'll notice that there are more red bears than there are of any other color.

Haribo found that U.S. consumers prefer raspberry-flavored bears, so they tweaked the mix in production.

Today, the company's Wisconsin factory churns out 60 million gold bears a day.

And it's this factory that Haribo is betting on to take on the U.S. candy market.

Haribo is one of the largest gummy candy manufacturers in the world, thanks in part to a simple strategy, focus.

A lot of the bigger companies have these very diversified businesses.

Hershey, best known for chocolate, now makes pretzels and dipped fruit snacks.

And Ferrara owns brands across hard, chewy and powder-based candies.

And it just allows them sort of to have something for everyone versus just having really a single product that you're marketing all year long.

But Haribo goes the other way, focusing primarily on gummy candy.

They are pretty much a one-product company.

It's really just simplicity of production.

If you even think about, like, in your home kitchen, if you were just making one meal over and over and over again, you really only need a certain set of ingredients, a couple of pots and pans.

But in an industrial context, it's really the same.

In the U.S., the company uses select core recipes.

Gives us expertise so that when we want to make a flavor change or a texture change, it allows us to tweak things.

And its scale gives the company an advantage in negotiations for equipment and ingredients.

The leverage it gives us is just the fact that we're buying more of one thing.

When you are able to buy more of something, you get volume discounts.

But if your particular product isn't the one that's currently on trend, you can sort of lose out.

Efficiency only benefits you when you are efficiently making something people want.

So knowing exactly what consumers want is key to staying on top of demand and, in fact, creating more demand.

That's why having facilities that are local has definite benefits in the sense that you can just really be closer to your consumer.

That strategy is clear in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, home to Haribo's first U.S. production facility, a 500,000 square foot factory that opened in 2023.

we were importing 100 percent of our product.

Getting Haribo's to the United States used to take months.

It could be up to 12 to 14 weeks because it had to be made in Europe.

Then it went on a very long boat journey.

Now it's a matter of weeks, with the Wisconsin factory producing about 25 different types of gummies.

And the Wisconsin base is key to determining what Haribo makes in the U.S.

The faster you can react, the better your sales are.

Local offices run focus groups and can develop new products accordingly in shorter periods of time.

We ask about both texture, flavor, but how you're going to use the product.

We also do the same testing for packaging, because packaging also plays an important role.

All that feedback drives a very specific insight.

What's considered good varies by region, and Haribo tailors accordingly.

In the U.S., the original mix included Gold Bears, Happy Cola, Friendship Rings, Twin Snakes, and Happy Cherries.

But after learning American consumers wanted the fried egg and foam heart gummies they saw in the U.K. version, Haribo swapped in those marshmallow textures.

This strategy plays out across Haribo's 16 factories worldwide.

The company's manufacturing facility in Turkey, for example, makes halal-certified products to meet local demand.

In a Scandinavian country, Denmark, Sweden, they love licorice and they love a strong licorice taste and even salty products. This wouldn't work in other markets.

So the decentralized structure helps us to be agile and to react on developments in different markets.

If demand is strong enough, Haribo will also expand its horizons.

Take the Shimalo, the only Haribo product that includes chocolate.

An existing marshmallow product was the base, but market research in Belgium showed demand for a chocolate version, so Haribo launched it there.

And Haribo can use its larger international portfolio to its benefit.

One of the big things that U.S. candy companies are facing are a lot of pressure from federal and state policymakers to transition to natural food dyes.

Some Haribo products made in the States still have Red Forty in the ingredients, but the company already uses fruit and vegetable juices for color in other products and in other countries.

We, in our current portfolio, have different types of coloring agents, different kinds of flavoring agents, so we feel very prepared to do things different or if there's regulations that change.

Having this factory gives us the agility to make those changes.

Today, Haribo produces more than 800 different products around the world, and in the past year alone, Haribo has added 2.6 million new American households to its customer base.

Different candies have their moments in the sun.

Gummies are really going gangbusters right now.

Sugar candy sales are up 74 percent since 2020, and with cocoa prices historically high.

You're seeing a lot of the big confection companies rolling out, you know, new gummy products as a result.

So for Haribo, on the one hand, it's great.

You know, they've probably got a lot of demand for their core product.

On the other hand, it is inevitably going to mean more competition.

They just have to be really nimble and adaptable and keep trying to appeal to consumers with new products to keep the sort of fire alive for gummies as long as they can.