Children’s entertainment brand Nickelodeon is teaming up with US food firms to launch a children’s range of fruit and vegetable products featuring some of its popular cartoon characters.
The initiative will bring new products to US shelves in the autumn and teams cartoon celebrities such as Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants to fresh apples, pears and cherries from Borton & Sons, organic shelled soybeans and frozen organic soybean pods from Seapoint Farms and carrot and apple dips from Reichel Foods.
The two characters alone bring in around $1bn each annually in sales of branded goods, according to Nickelodeon, which appears on satellite and cable channels in the UK.
Nickelodeon said its new agreements are based on the success of previous initiatives, which saw the same characters appearing on spinach, baby carrots and clementines last year.
According to LGS Specialty Sales, which supplied the clementine products, Dora and SpongeBob were an “instant hit” increasing sales of the products by almost 30 per cent. And Grimmway Farms, which sold SpongeBob baby carrots, said the item enjoyed double digit sales increases in some regional US retailers.
The move follows Tesco’s success in obtaining licensing rights to use Disney characters including Winnie the Pooh and Tigger on branded fruit products, such as apples and bananas.
And Del Monte Foods in the US has also announced a deal with the Sesame Workshop, which will bring Elmo, Grover and Cookie Monster onto packs of green beans, sweet peas and corn, starting in September.
Bugs Bunny, Tweety and the Tasmanian Devil are also in for a piece of the pie, after Ready Pac teamed up with Warner to launch Cool Cuts Ready Snax single-serve packs of apples, grapes and carrots featuring the characters.
But dissenters say the Nickelodeon move follows threats by parent groups to take its holding company to court for marketing junk-food to kids.
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