Hershey's confronted a major shift in consumer behavior as health consciousness rose and the confectionery category faced ongoing declines in profitability. The company needed a strategy for remaining relevant to modern consumers who were increasingly questioning indulgent food choices — without abandoning the legacy brand equity that made Hershey's one of America's most recognized food brands.
Vivaldi developed a health-focused innovation platform and brand strategy that resulted in the creation of "Eat. Think. Smile." — a new health-forward brand launched under the Apure Foods umbrella. The strategy mapped a credible path from legacy indulgence positioning toward permissible pleasure and wellness-adjacent territory.
The "Eat. Think. Smile." brand launched successfully in five states, achieving strong consumer testing results and early traction with health-conscious consumers and influential "mommy blogger" audiences — demonstrating how a legacy confectionery brand could credibly enter the health and wellness space.
Hershey’s engaged Vivaldi to address the structural decline of confectionery profitability and the rise of health-conscious consumer behavior without abandoning the legacy indulgence equity at the core of the business. Vivaldi developed the health-focused innovation platform that produced “Eat. Think. Smile.,” a new brand under the Apure Foods umbrella that launched in five states with strong testing results and early traction among health-conscious consumers and mommy blogger audiences.
The Hershey Company is the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America, with revenues exceeding $10 billion and a portfolio of iconic brands including Hershey’s, Reese’s, Kit Kat (US), Jolly Rancher, and SkinnyPop. Founded in 1894 and headquartered in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the company sells products in over 80 countries. Hershey’s has been at the forefront of addressing consumer demand for better-for-you confectionery options while protecting its core indulgence positioning.
Vivaldi developed the innovation platform and brand strategy that produced “Eat. Think. Smile.,” a health-forward brand launched under Apure Foods. The brand reached the market in five states, achieved strong consumer testing results, and gained early traction with health-conscious consumers and influential mommy blogger audiences, showing that a legacy confectionery company could enter the wellness space credibly.
The team distinguished between brand territory Hershey’s could stretch with its existing equities and territory that required a separately branded vehicle, then defined permissible pleasure as a space that needed its own brand identity to be credible. That separation is what justified launching Apure Foods as a new entity rather than attempting to extend the Hershey’s name into wellness.
Indulgence equities are built on permission to enjoy, and that permission depends on the brand never apologizing for what it is. A wellness extension under the indulgent parent brand implicitly concedes that the parent has a problem to fix, which weakens both the parent and the extension, while a separately branded vehicle can claim wellness territory without that contradiction.
The lesson is that the architectural choice between extension and new brand is the single most important decision in a legacy company’s wellness response, and it has to be made before any product development begins. Companies that default to extension because it feels cheaper often discover the credibility cost is far higher than the cost of building a separately branded vehicle would have been.
