Are freeze dried sweets the holiday treats you’re looking for? Tik Tok at least believes so…
pic: Neill Barston
This coming week is the start of a family break that I’ve been very much looking forward to and comes after what has been a pretty intense first half of 2024, with a huge array of events and key news breaking across the industry.
So the chance to switch off is always welcome on those rare occasions that the opportunity to do so arises, and in truth I personally feeling grateful for the chance to get away when I know a lot of people out there are perhaps not so fortunate to either be able to take the time off.
But I do think the ability to recharge your batteries and just entirely switch off from all things work is extremely valuable, and certainly something that I have never taken for granted over the years, though in truth, I’ve rarely managed it personally!
I found myself particularly intrigued by a shop selling what was enthusiastically billed as ‘the latest Tik Tok craze’ of freeze dried sweets – I like to think of myself as being fairly well informed, but this, I must admit is a trend that has passed me by. I guess I am plainly just not in the teenage demographic that this is seemingly pitched at.
Significantly, it doesn’t seem to be a mere fad that’s going to go away overnight either, with even the most basic search I now quickly cast around for revealing that some of the social media influencers were racking-up hits of more than 16-17 million views discussing this freeze dried sensation. If the hype is to be believed, it basically ends up making flavours even more intense than they were originally designed to be, which could potentially be something of a mixed blessing in product formulation terms, but what do I know! If something’s popular, it’s popular, the normal rules of logic don’t seem to apply.
But one thing really did grab me – these freeze dried sweets, or at least the ones I encountered were not trading hands at the affordable treat category price range, they were more around the £5 and upwards for a silver foil pouch, which was far from easily affordable. However, people may just be willing to pay more for the latest craze, that’s probably how things have worked since the dawn of marketing campaigns.
Whether this will turn out to be a long-term trend is absolutely anyone’s guess, but to my mind, drying out sweets is far from my ideal vision of what a good sweet treat is about, but then each to their own!
Neill Barston, editor, Confectionery Production
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