Why Are Snacks Built for One Person When People Want to Share Them?

There's a real gap between what snacks are being built to do these days and what people actually seem to want from them.

Consider these statistics from Mondelēz's State of Snacking Report (2024 and 2026):

•        71% of consumers globally call sharing snacks their love language

•        41% of Canadians see candy as social

•        Almost 80% of Indians surveyed want to see friends' reactions when trying new snacks

At the same time, meals, which used to be reliable social infrastructure for connection, are increasingly seen as replaceable by snacks. For its part, snacking is focused on protein, satiety and functional benefits, leaving unclaimed the everyday social space that's getting vacated.

To be fair, the big CPG brands haven't missed the sharing behavior. Skittles, Lay's, Doritos, holiday candy all have share bags and gifting formats, and their Super Bowl campaigns turn snacks into the centrepiece of a gathering.

But this is mostly occasion activation: showing up on a calendar date everyone already knows and that's built around something else, like Halloween, the holidays, game day. It's not occasion creation – where a brand provides the rationale to gather together. Think a chips bowl at a watch party vs. a charcuterie board.

This difference is significant for founder-led brands. They don't have the brand association with events built over decades or huge media and activation budgets. In a way, they don't have a choice but to create the occasion to be used.

This is not a limitation. It's a waiting growth space.

Snacks are typically seen as add-ons to pre-existing occasions. But these tend to be one-off or limited, where the snack is incidental. What if your product was the reason people came together, regularly?

Taking a snack brand towards social connection doesn't require a new product, not at first at least. You don't need a new production line, new SKU, more listing fees, marketing to drive awareness. It's expensive, slow, and unnecessary.

Instead, there's a way to encourage social interactions with what you already have. It requires two relatively simple pivots.

Pivot No. 1: Change the unit of consumption.

Chances are, your product is packaged for solo consumption – one serving size, maybe for on-the-go. This may have been intentional, or this may have been adopted because that's what your category expects. Regardless, the design signals individual use as the default.

For many snack brands, there's nothing that prevents your product from being consumed communally (to be sure, there are brands to whom this doesn't apply – the ones that are intentionally created for solo purposes, like energy bars). Tinned sardines are great for eating together. So are customizable ramen kits.

You can test the proposition by taking 3 of your single-serve units, bundling them together and labelling them as 'for sharing'. Insert a hosting prompt card that helps generate quality conversations. From my experience, choose your best-selling SKUs to drive maximal relevance.

Nothing about the product changes, just an outer carton and insert. You can avoid even these additions by running a promotion with the sharing theme and a printable hosting card on your site. It's easy to do as soon as Monday, and reversible if it's not working. The key is to promote the multi-pack as something to share, and not just a price-off event.

The question to ask yourself: Can my brand stretch from “single serve” to “sharing serve”?

Pivot No. 2: Change the messaging frame from “just for me” to “it's about us”.

The language on your website and social media may be dialling up the individual use case: “your afternoon pick-me-up”, “when it's me-time” or some such thing. There's nothing wrong with this. For a limited time, try a communication campaign that promotes “we-time”. Do it in a way that extends naturally from your original positioning.

This is a cheap, reversible test to discover if you can give consumers a way to share their snacks.

The question to ask yourself: Does your language leave room for someone else at the table?

What to actually do this week

You don't need to make a big investment to know if you've got an untapped growth opportunity. You just need two small, boring, reversible tests:

•        The Multi-Pack Bundle Test: Take an existing SKU. Bundle three units into a new outer carton, or run a buy-three promotion with a hosting card promoting the social angle. Over a month, see if it attracts new users or causes existing users to also buy the multi-pack, in one retail door or one DTC channel.

•        The “We-Time” Message: Take one SKU (could be the same one in the bundle test, or a different one). Swap the web copy from individual-occasion to shared-occasion language. Run it for a month and see what shifts – velocity, review content, social mentions.

If nothing changes, that's information too.

Beyond the commercial opportunity waiting to be taken, there's a more fundamental reason to do this: the people you've built your brand for. They're not just consumers, they're human beings searching for real connection.

The real question is, can you imagine your brand being the reason people come together?