Kodiak is committed to crafting premium, delicious breakfasts and snacks with 100% whole grains and protein for fuel that sticks. They’re also committed to using all-natural sweeteners like honey in products like Buttermilk & Honey Frontier Cakes and Blueberry Muffin Power Cups. We spoke with Aaron Robinson, senior director of brand management, and Emily Karz, associate director of R&D, about everything from honey’s functional properties to consumer perception and a major new launch in 2025.
How do you position honey in Kodiak’s branding and marketing?
Aaron: I think that especially with this new [Honey Saves Hives] partnership, we're going to be looking at ways for [talking about honey from a marketing or education perspective] more in the future. From a sugar content perspective, we’re constantly trying to find the right balance of sweetness in our products—it’s an ongoing discussion for us. We’re committed to never using artificial sweeteners at Kodiak; there are even some natural sweeteners that are off the table for us. We try to better understand: What do we feel comfortable with as a brand? How do our consumers perceive different sweeteners? We've done some first party research, and we found that honey had the highest awareness and the highest acceptance rate of any of the sweeteners that we tested. So, we feel super confident that when we use honey in our products, it's going to be seen as a big win for our consumers who are reading labels and looking for cleaner products.
What varietal of honey is your favorite to use from a flavor profile perspective?
Emily: We use wildflower honey, and from different locations it has different flavor profiles, so the way that we get the right delivery is by blending the different varietals together. We go for a more amber honey profile. If we get varietals that may be a little bit lighter or a little bit darker, we blend those together to ensure consistency.
In terms of functional properties, how does honey work with other ingredients in your products?
Emily: We try to maximize the honey from a flavor delivery standpoint, but one of the big things that we have to keep in mind is the humectancy of it, or the water absorption properties. And so, we actually have a, I'm going to say, ‘proprietary mixing stuff’ that we use for some of our products to ensure that we can dry out the product more effectively.
Any new made-with-honey products in 2025?
Aaron: We’re launching a new innovation item in January: granola. It’s our biggest innovation launch we’ve had, revenue-wise, at Kodiak in company history, given the distribution that we have. The hero SKU is a honey oak flavor. We’re really excited about it, and assuming that this is a successful launch for us, we see opportunities to expand to different packaging formats within the granola, potentially even different sub-lines that offer a variety of nutritional benefits. An example that we've considered for the future is launching an even higher protein granola—again, assuming that's a top-performing flavor for us—we'd still be using some real honey in there. I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to expand granola in the future, both in terms of variety of product offerings as well as packaging formats.
Some of the other product benefits on our granola launch for next year: We will be the highest protein of any of the mainstream granola brands that you'll see on shelf at most retailers. And we'll also be single digit sugar, which was a key design principle that we gave Emily as we went into the product design process. We also made the call to use coconut oil instead of seed oils, given some of the sensitivity around seed oils. We're not necessarily a brand that's against seed oils, but it’s something that we think will be a cool differentiator in that space. We're also not using any soy proteins, which is another, from our perspective, lower quality protein source. And so, we feel really great about the protein sources, as well as the sweeteners and oils that we've used in that product.
Emily: We had a light amber honey that we developed the initial granola formula with, and we tested it with consumers. Consumers said that they weren’t getting enough honey delivery and sweetness. So, we maximized the amount of honey that we could add from a humectancy standpoint. We also converted over to amber honey that brought through some of the notes of honey in the product. Without changing nutritionals, it really elevated the taste. I think it’s now a lot of people’s favorite out of the SKUs, because the flavor delivery has improved with the optimization.
I am really excited about the granola. We’ve tasted a lot of products in the market, and I think this one really has an excellent flavor profile and textural delivery.
Aaron: We completed some consumer sensory testing on our honey flavor versus the top flavor in market currently, and ours outperformed on taste. So, when you couple that with what we feel like are superior nutritionals and ingredients, I think we're feeling really optimistic about how that'll perform in market.
Back to Honey Saves Hives. What made the partnership enticing for you?
Aaron: As we’ve been developing this granola innovation, the use of honey in our products has become a little bit more on the forefront of our minds. Kodiak is a brand that has deep ties to the outdoors and nature, and part of our company’s purpose is to inspire wilder, wide-open lives, so understanding that bees play such a vital role in the ecosystems in which they exist, it feels like a really natural partnership for us to join the Honey Saves Hives program and help further that mission.
Learn more about becoming a Honey Saves Hives brand partner: https://honeysaveshives.com/partners/brand-partners/