Sweets & Snacks Expo Is in Two Weeks. Here Are 3 Resources Worth Your Time
If you’re preparing for Sweets & Snacks Expo, your team is probably deep in the usual work: finalizing launches, confirming meetings, sorting samples, and making sure the booth and materials are ready. All important.
Having attended the show in a past life as a CPG guy, I know the energy is going to be around new products, new flavors, new formats. That’s the fun part. But the teams that tend to get the most out of it are the ones who pair that excitement with sharper retailer and category-focused storytelling.
We pulled together three resources that can help you level up your conversations, whether you’re pitching new items, having informal top-to-tops, or just thinking about how your team shows up in the category.
I. How to Turn New Item Conversations Into Commitments
New products are the heartbeat of Sweets & Snacks, and your team has done the hard work to get here. The product deserves a strong introduction.
What we’ve seen work well across our clients is leading with the problem the product solves before getting into the product itself. Maybe there’s a gap in the category that shoppers are already signaling. Maybe there’s a format that the channel or retailer’s assortment is missing. When the story starts there, the product becomes the logical answer, and the buyer leans in because you’ve already connected it to something they care about.
We recently built a selling story for a major CPG launch that exceeded their forecasts. The product was great, no question. But what our client said made the difference was that the story was grounded in a category gap, not just the product’s features. Great product plus strong category-first storytelling is a powerful combination.
This applies whether you’re presenting a full sell-in deck on a type A launch or having a five-minute conversation at the booth. It’s less about the slides and more about the mindset: lead with the shopper, the category, and the retailer, then let your product earn its place in the conversation.
📌 Read the full article: New Item Launch Presentations: Lead With the Why, Not the What
And if you want a quick one-pager for your new item, our Costco article is a useful reference. It’s written for Costco but works for any retail customer.
II. How to Get the Most Out of Your Top-to-Top Conversations
Sweets & Snacks brings senior leaders from both sides of the table into the same building, which means top-to-top conversations are going to happen, whether they’re formal sit-downs in the meeting rooms or shorter exchanges on the floor.
The pattern we see often is that teams load their decks with product updates, hoping the portfolio itself will do the convincing. The retailer across the table, though, is thinking about their shoppers, their category performance, and their P&L. Those are two different starting points, and the gap between them is where a lot of conversations stall.
I’ve sat in enough of these rooms to believe this strongly: storytelling alone won’t carry a top-to-top. You need a solid strategy and real solutions. But what I’ve seen consistently is that even a small shift in framing makes a real difference. Something as simple as “We understand that space is constrained at checkout for your stores” or “We know your shoppers over-index on X” changes the temperature of the conversation. The retailer stops evaluating and starts collaborating, because you’ve shown them you’re thinking about their business, not just yours.
We walk through a storytelling framework for this (SCQA) and a real example where it helped a CPG team align with a national grocer on a $10M+ joint business plan.
📌 Read the full article: How to Create a Killer Story for Your Top-to-Top Meeting with Retailers
III. How to Show Up as the Category Growth Architect (Not Just the Reporter)
This one is more of a mindset shift, but if you lead a category management team, it’s worth the read before the show.
Bala Gurumoorthy, VP of Category Management at Ferrero USA, put it well in a recent conversation: the role of category management is evolving from reporting the news to creating it. Not just sharing dashboards and recapping what happened last quarter, but helping retailers see where the growth is and how to go after it.
His team walks this talk. At Sweets & Snacks this year, Ferrero is setting up their Category Corner again, with touchscreen displays where buyers can explore category insights on their own: how to grow premium chocolate, how to drive impulse sales at checkout, how to build out e-commerce in snacking. It’s Ferrero showing up as a partner in category growth, not just a supplier with a product to sell.
If your team has strong category knowledge, Sweets & Snacks is a great stage to demonstrate it. Not by adding more charts to your deck, but by bringing forward a point of view on where the category is headed. And if you want to see what that looks like in real life, swing by the Ferrero booth. We helped design the experience, so we’re a little biased, but honestly, it’s worth the visit. 😉
📌 Read the full article: Lessons from a Ferrero Leader on Shaping the Future of Category Management
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