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The first time consumers heard about it, they had no idea what to make of it. And the first time they tasted it, the peculiar confection didn’t leave much more of an impression. So there was nothing to suggest that Nerds Gummy Clusters would be a success.

And now Americans can’t stop eating them.

It’s one of the biggest hits in the candy aisle this Halloween—and easily the unlikeliest.

Only six years ago, all of Nerds had less than $50 million in sales. This year, Nerds Gummy Clusters alone has already generated more than $500 million.

The growing popularity of Nerds Gummy Clusters is an improbable outcome for a brand that has existed for more than four decades but had become such an afterthought that the company behind this breakout product barely even bothered marketing it.

Nerds Gummy Clusters annual sales

Nerds Gummy Clusters annual sales which rose to more than $500 million in 2024, up from $8 million in 2020.

Note: 2024 data is through October.

Source: the company

In fact, almost every piece of data the candy maker collected suggested that Nerds Gummy Clusters would be a dud. But in a surprising move at a time when data drives so many decisions in the halls of corporate America, executives at Ferrara Candy went with their guts—and the product became a smash.

Not long ago, Nerds were uncool. When the brand was acquired in 2018, the entire Nerds line had roughly $40 million in sales. In the hopes of revitalizing a stale brand from the 1980s, the privately held candy conglomerate knew it needed to develop a new product.

Nerds got their glow-up with the 2020 release of a bean-shaped gummy coated in technicolor, irregularly shaped pebbles.

The following year, Nerds Gummy Clusters were responsible for nearly $100 million of sales, according to the company. This year, sales have already crossed $500 million—even before Halloween. This one product now generates close to 90% of Nerds’ overall revenue.

Nerds sales now rival candy powerhouses like Starburst, Sour Patch Kids and even Skittles, according to TD Cowen analyst Robert Moskow.

“I have never seen a new product in this category get this big so fast,” said Moskow, who has covered the candy sector for more than 20 years.

So how did Nerds, which Bon Appétit magazine once called “the gravel at the bottom of your fish tank,” make it to the top of your Halloween basket?

The revenge of Nerds began when the people who took over the brand ignored their tests—and followed their taste.

Nerds or Dweebs?

Nerds were born from the sort of extensive consumer research that executives mostly ignored when they created Nerds Gummy Clusters.

chart shows Nerds Gummy Clusters as a percentage of all Nerds candy sales, growing from zero in 2019 to 88% in 2024

Nerds Gummy Clusters

sales as a share of

all Nerds candy

88%

75%

*2024 data is for

January-October.

Source:

the company

50

25

0

2019

’20

’21

’22

’23

’24*

The tiny, crunchy, tart, novelty candy that came out in 1983 was launched by a team led by Angelo Fraggos, a young marketing manager in the Willy Wonka Candy division of Sunmark, a St. Louis-based confectionery company that no longer exists.

To get feedback from their most valuable consumers, tweens with allowance money, Wonka’s leaders turned schools into research labs and candy shops. They tested everything—from the complementary tastes of grape and strawberry to the proper amount of tang.

When company researchers observed that boys poured candy in their mouths and girls put candy in their hands, the two-cell box was outfitted with a slide top to make the confection portable and shareable. Today, that original packaging is known to Nerds nerds as “dual chamber.”

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Even the product name was rigorously tested. Every year, the company polled students about catchy new slang—and what they liked to call each other. It put those words on sample packages, placed the boxes next to each other and asked kids: Which one would you buy?

They chose the name Nerds over Dweebs.

At that point, Wonka employees glued some boxes together and dropped them off in stores across Chicago and St. Louis for retail tests. The handpacked Nerds quickly sold out.

In 1985, when Nerds rolled out across the country, the National Candy Wholesalers Association named it candy of the year.

Angelo Fraggos, who led the team that created Nerds, has a collection of Nerds memorabilia. PHOTO: MICHELLE GUSTAFSON FOR WSJ

Nerds Gummy Clusters creators shrank the size of the hard-shell Nerd candy to best coat the gummy middle. PHOTO: EVAN ANGELASTRO FOR WSJ

Nestlé acquired the Nerds brand in 1988, and eventually, the brand was sold in 2018, along with the rest of Nestlé USA’s confectionery business, to Italian candy giant Ferrero and U.S.-based Ferrara Candy. Ferrero kept the chocolate brands, while Ferrara took control of the sugar candies.

In search of a new product that would appeal to younger buyers, Ferrara Candy didn’t turn to the latest technology. It just turned back the clock.

In 2001, Nerds introduced the Nerds Rope, a chewy, fruit-flavored gummy candy rolled in crispy Nerds. Even people who loved Nerds Rope didn’t like the way it stained their hands and resulted in Nerds spewing everywhere. Consumers were looking for something that was “poppable,” something they could eat on the go and was less messy, said Heather Boggs, Ferrara’s chief innovation officer.

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That insight was the beginning of Ferrara’s two-year odyssey to engineer a candy that was similar to Nerds Rope but superior. It would have to be easier and cleaner to eat—and gummier.

Tangy, crunchy, gummy

One of the first things the Nerds development team did was test the idea of a poppable, rainbow-colored candy with a crunchy outside and gummy inside, using an online survey that gave consumers a basic description of the product and some concept images.

Chart shows U.S. confectionery retail sales which are on the rise.

U.S. confectionery retail sales

FORECASTS

$60 billion

50

40

30

20

10

0

2020

’21

’22

’23

’24

’25

’26

Note: 2024 figure is estimated.

Source: Euromonitor International

Their response: Huh?

“They were kind of like, ‘I’m not sure I totally get this. Is this something I want to eat?’ ” said Katie Duffy, Ferrara’s vice president of global brands.

The company decided to plow ahead in the hopes that consumers would change their minds once they actually had something to taste. “At that point,” Duffy said, “what did we have to lose?”

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It helped the Nerds team that big retailers like Walmart, Target and Walgreens wanted the product as soon as possible after seeing prototypes.

Ferrara tested five different graphics for packaging and found that actually showing the sweet, gummy center was crucial to branding.

Maybe the most important decision they made was changing the product’s working name of Nerds Clusters to Nerds Gummy Clusters.

“Otherwise,” Duffy said, “consumers may have been led to believe that it was just tiny clusters—like granola.”

Highlighting the word “gummy” also allowed Ferrara to capitalize on one of the hottest trends in candy.

Today’s gummies come in all shapes, sizes and species: bears, fish, worms, Sour Patch Kids. As popular as they are with consumers, especially kids, they’re even more mouthwatering for companies.

Sugar candy sales are up 74% since 2020, according to Euromonitor, compared with a 38% increase for chocolate candy. Confectionery giants have expanded their product lines to include more gummy offerings—like Shaq-a-Licious XL Gummies, which Hershey recently launched with former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal—in part because soaring cocoa prices are putting margin pressure on their chocolate staples.

“Gummy represents a huge opportunity,” Hershey Chief Executive Michele Buck said this year.

Company researchers found boys pour candy into their mouths. Girls pour it into their hands. Nerds dual-chamber box has a slide top to make the candies portable and sharable.

EVAN ANGELASTRO FOR WSJ; MICHELLE GUSTAFSON FOR WSJ

In 2019, the year after acquiring the Nerds brand, Ferrara tested its Nerds gummy offering with a focus group of 250 consumers in the Midwest. But when participants offered grades on how much they liked the new product, the results of the quantitative study were inconclusive. The scores fell just below the candy maker’s threshold.

“The product scored… OK,” said Boggs, the chief innovation officer.

“Consumer testing is meant to be somewhat of a predictive method,” added Anna Walsh Olsen, Ferrara’s senior director of research and development. “But it’s not always foolproof.”

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Taste testers wanted more flavor and felt the chewing experience wasn’t gummy enough, so Ferrara made the product even tangier and tweaked the crunch-to-chew ratio.

In the summer of 2020, the candy company and the inventor of Nerds Gummy Clusters, a Ferrara scientist named Sean Oomens, filed for a patent on a “dual-textured confectionery” with a “chewy center” and “crunchy coating.”

The details in the application, which is pending, included an exact definition of gummy (“a springy, resilient character with varying degrees of firmness”) and a less exact shape of the cluster (“generally ovoid, spherical or bean-shaped”).

Then it was time to find out if people would geek out over Nerds Gummy Clusters.

The sweet spot

Candy makers have faced a rocky road in recent years, navigating sticky issues such as labor shortages, supply-chain issues, inflation and cocoa shortages. While U.S. candy sales are up overall in recent years, much of the increase can be traced back to inflation. Health-and-wellness trends have reshaped American diets and eating habits, and investors are worried about the impact of revolutionary weight-loss drugs.

Angelo Fraggos's Nerds memorobilia, including cards, a hat, and plaques he received during his time working for Wonka.

MICHELLE GUSTAFSON FOR WSJ

To broaden the appeal of their products, candy makers are developing sweets that offer a range of textures, like crunchy and chewy—or, as Nerds executives call it, a “multi-sensorial” textural experience.

Gummy Clusters hit the sweet spot.

But making them wasn’t as simple as sticking a bunch of Nerds on a gummy.

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Achieving the right balance of crunchy and chewy in nonchocolate candy is tricky because of “moisture migration,” in which water moves between components and can affect the product’s quality, said Rich Hartel, a University of Wisconsin-Madison food scientist.

Ferrara’s experiments with Gummy Clusters did result in batches of soggy Nerds, according to a person familiar with the process. The patent on Gummy Clusters suggests that Ferrara’s candy scientists solved their problem with additives such as gum arabic, an additive that prevents moisture from the chewy center from seeping into the candy pebble’s coating.

That wasn’t the only challenge they had to overcome. The candy had to be small enough to eat in one bite, roughly the size of a Peanut M&M. They also had to shrink traditional Nerds, which measure between 0.2 and 1 millimeter, for optimal coverage of the gummy center—and the perfect crunch.

Their name for these miniature pellets? Baby Nerds.

Nerds Gummy Clusters were not well-received by candy testers at first. PHOTO: EVAN ANGELASTRO FOR WSJ

Nerding out

Once the Gummy Clusters were made, they had to be marketed.

When the original Nerds were released, that meant advertising in newspapers. Sunmark offered sweepstakes with extravagant prizes, like a 19-inch color television. Another campaign put the candy’s mascot on an illustration of Mount Rushmore and invited shoppers to write essays about their favorite historical nerds.

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Forty years later, the marketing effort behind Nerds Gummy Clusters was bare-bones. Ferrara spent a paltry $700,000 on digital ads in 2021, according to estimates from ad tracker MediaRadar.

But one Friday night that January, Kylie Jenner posted about Nerds Gummy Clusters on Instagram and declared the candy “next level.”

“I’m obsessed,” she cooed.

Ferrara executives were stunned. They found out Jenner was a fan at the same time as the influencer’s 200 million followers.

Her endorsement was just about the best marketing that Ferrara could have bought—and the company says it didn’t cost a penny.

Marketers of the original Nerds in the 1980s advertised in newspapers with contests and sweepstakes. PHOTO: FERRARA CANDY

Like so many products that become unexpected sensations these days, the rise of Gummy Clusters has been fueled by social-media platforms such as TikTok. The short-form video platform is such a powerful force in the modern candy business that many of today’s sweets are designed to trigger visceral reactions in the hope that they will spark viral posts.

The algorithm is particularly effective when it’s fed clever videos of addictive products—like Nerds Gummy Clusters.

At first, there wasn’t enough supply to keep up with the sudden demand. Ferrara reconfigured some of its factories and increased the manufacturing capacity of Nerds by 350%. But until it ramped up production, the company felt that advertising was not just unnecessary but almost counterproductive. “You can’t drive consumers to the shelf,” Duffy said, “if the product is flying off the shelf.”

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As factories began churning out more Gummy Clusters, Ferrara cranked up its marketing.

Chart shows Nerds ad spending rising in recent years.

Nerds estimated

ad spending

$19.9

million

$14.3

million

Source: MediaRadar

January

through

July

$711K

$440K

2021

2022

2023

2024

Ferrara purchased a spot for Nerds on television’s most coveted advertising stage, where 30 seconds of ad time cost roughly $7 million—not including production costs. The Super Bowl was the first time Ferrara had bought TV ads of any kind for Nerds. It debuted a commercial inspired by the movie “Flashdance,” starring an animated Nerds Gummy Cluster re-enacting Jennifer Beals’s chain-pull dance move. The company plans to advertise again during this season’s Super Bowl.

One of the people who was shocked to see Nerds on his TV during the game was a 72-year-old man who helped bring the product to life.

Not that Angelo Fraggos needed an introduction to Nerds Gummy Clusters. He’s worked in the food business for his entire career, eventually moving from candy to private equity, and his New Jersey home is stocked with all sorts of Nerds keepsakes for his grandchildren.

He was naturally curious the first time he heard about Gummy Clusters a few years ago. So the father of Nerds rushed over to the nearest Target to review the product for himself.

“Everything that has Nerds on it,” he said, “I buy it, I taste it and I smile.”

Angelo Fraggos shows off a vintage T-shirt, part of his Nerds memorabilia collection. PHOTO: MICHELLE GUSTAFSON FOR WSJ

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com and Suzanne Vranica at Suzanne.Vranica@wsj.com

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5624590&forum_id=2#48280726)

So the polls were wrong? Is that what you are saying, libs?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5624590&forum_id=2#48280747)

Wild

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5624590&forum_id=2#48280757)

They sell these things in yuge family size bags

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5624590&forum_id=2#49047122)