I was in Japan last year, and the gummy aisle broke my brain a little.
Not because of the flavors, though those were wild too. It was the texture variety. I kept picking things up and eating them just to understand what was happening in my mouth. Hard gummies that had a specific resistance before giving way. Soft ones with a layered chew, like there were two different materials working in sequence. Aerated ones that felt almost creamy on the outside but had a gel center. Peelable ones where the act of eating it was part of the product. Fettuccini gummies that had the same chewy texture of an al dente pasta you’d get from a good restaurant.
If you want to understand what I’m talking about, follow @dante_japan on Instagram. He’s been snacking through Japan and documenting it with the kind of specificity that makes you realize how shallow the rest of the world’s candy vocabulary actually is. Watch a few of his videos and you’ll start noticing all the dimensions he’s describing: the sound, the resistance, the way something melts versus dissolves versus snaps. It opens something up. Once you’ve experienced texture as a full dimension of a product – not just a background property but the actual point – you can’t un-see it.
Most gummies in other countries are designed around flavor. Texture has been a consequence of the base. Chewy is the default, and it means somewhere between Haribo and Hi-Chew depending on the gelatin, pectin or starch ratio. There’s no vocabulary for what comes next because no one’s really been building toward it.
Japan has been building toward it for decades. The language for texture there is specific in ways that don’t translate directly; there are words for the soft elasticity of mochi, for the delicate vs. hearty versions of crisp, for the exact stretch-to-give ratio of a particular chew. Brands use these words on packaging. Shoppers know what they’re buying before they open the bag. The texture promise is on the front.
This precision shows up in how products are developed too. Meiji built an actual machine to measure bite resistance and map different chew profiles to emotional states.
The reason this matters now, specifically, is that the US market is moving in this direction whether brands are ready or not.
GLP-1 drugs are at about 12% of US adults and climbing. These consumers eat less, more slowly, and with less flavor sensitivity. More satisfaction has to come from fewer bites. Tate & Lyle surveyed 500 current and former users across North America and the finding that stood out: smaller portions now carry more emotional weight, and airy, crispy, creamy, layered formats are what actually deliver that , not just “chewy.”
And even outside GLP-1, look at where the growth is. Nerds Gummy Clusters at 125% year-over-year. Rotten’s answer to Nerds with their lower sugar version is crushing. Dubai chocolate going viral on the back of a kunafa filling that nobody could stop describing because of how it felt. The non-chocolate segment is up nearly $5 billion since 2019. People are chasing something. They don’t always have the language for it, but they know it when they bite into it.
We Didn’t Just Write About This
We’ve been doing on-site visits in Turkey over the past few weeks, specifically hunting for confectionery manufacturers who are doing something interesting with texture and format.
A few of our new partners surprised us – products we hadn’t seen positioned for the US CPG market yet, with real production capability behind them. We’re now working with them to bring these to market: for branded CPG companies, store brands, and anyone else looking to launch something in this space.
If you’re a brand looking for a new gummy or confectionery product, either that’s a specific format you’ve had in mind or you just want to see what’s possible right now, reach out. And if you have a concept you want to build from scratch, we can work on that too.
This category is moving fast. Good time to be early.
That’s it for this week.
If you’re building something in CPG and need the right supplier or co-manufacturer to make it happen, Chapter Foods can help. We match brands, brokers, distributors and retailers with partners who are ready to move.
And if you’re a manufacturer looking to unlock new business or source higher-quality ingredients, we’re your direct line to the right buyers and better suppliers.
Can Koyuncu, Co-Founder & CMO