An entrepreneurial start-up is rolling out baked snacks that offer good taste and texture as well as protein, fibre and low sugar. They come in a blend designed to give a lasting energy lift and support a balanced lifestyle. And, in an innovation in the snack category, they also provide a dose of postbiotics. By Mikaela Lindén-Ibrahim.
If it’s anywhere near 3 o’clock in the afternoon when you’re reading this, chances are you are feeling a bit tired, unmotivated and unproductive. 3pm Afternoon Bites, named specifically after its intended usage occasion, is here to change that with a combination of fibre, protein and postbiotics.
“We observed that everyone encounters the 3pm slump,” said Jaime González-Mir in an interview with New Nutrition Business. “Those of us who work in offices and more sedentary settings, experience it more acutely than those who do not. Since no other brand was talking about it in any concerted manner, it was worth us exploring so we could own the occasion – the white space.”
González-Mir, who comes from a marketing background with major advertising agency BBDO, wanted to change that. In 2024 he teamed up with Christian Storandt, Eduardo Domínguez and Tomás Mualim to form 3pm.
The idea was inspired by “la merienda”, the Spanish and Latin American custom of having a light meal between lunch and dinner as well as the English ‘afternoon tea’. “It’s an occasion where people stop, connect with each other, nourish themselves and then they can go on with the rest of their day,” said González-Mir. “That doesn’t exist in the US, here it’s all about working every minute, it’s a different mentality and people tend to just work through the slump. They fill themselves up because they’re hungry, but they probably have something with too much sugar and then the crash is worse than the slump that they were trying to beat in the first place.”
Wanting to explore this white space, the founders started to work on a brand that would provide a healthy pick-me-up snack, while going beyond the physical product and creating an occasion and a culture that encourages consumers to take a break and look after themselves.
The team eventually decided that a cookie would be the best product format, finding that this is the category that is lacking the most in good nutrition. Dr Sylvia Klinger, a registered dietitian who is passionate about giving consumers the energy they need to do what they want to do, was brought in to help with product development – a project which ended up taking more than a year. The team trialled 21 recipes to get the taste right, followed by a further 14 trials to find a recipe that could be mass produced.
“It wasn’t easy, I gave the team some quite strict criteria that the product needed to fulfil while not being too high in sugar, salt or fat,” Klinger told New Nutrition Business in an interview. “But we got there, and the product is very close to what our gold standard is in terms of flavour, texture, and ‘better for you’.”
The finished product is a cookie that comes in two flavours: cranberry/ flaxseed and dark chocolate/almond. The base is oat and wheat flour, pea protein, oat bran and date paste. Sweeteners used include, apart from the date paste, cane sugar, allulose, chicory root fibre and honey. One 35g cookie provides 130 kcal, 6g fat, 17g carbohydrates (of which 7g is sugar), 5g of protein and 4g of fibre.
POSTBIOTIC PIONEER
3pm also delivers 100.8 billion cells of Immuse postbiotics, produced by Kyowa Hakko, which help enhance productivity, performance and recovery.
This makes 3pm the first snack product on the US market to include postbiotics and it’s a result of Klinger attending a conference where she met Kyowa Hakko, a US subsidiary of Kirin who manufactures the postbiotics. She was inspired by the potential health benefits, backed up by substantial scientific evidence, along with postbiotics’ stability which means that they can be used in baking and in shelf-stable products without losing effect.
“The benefits of Kyowa’s Immuse Postbiotics are science-backed by extensive studies that we provide a link to on our Content Hub,” explains González-Mir. “Of the three postbiotic manufacturers we researched and spoke to, Immuse was able to back all their claims – which was critical for us.”
STEERING CLEAR OF OVER-PROMISING
Postbiotics is still a very novel concept and Klinger and González-Mir both acknowledge that the brand is going to need to help people understand what they are.
“Educating consumers about what they are is going to be vital and this is where having a health professional like me onboard can help really get this message across,” said Klinger.
However, González-Mir highlights that whilst the postbiotics are a unique aspect of the product, without them, “we are confident that we have developed the most nutritionally balanced better-for-you cookie currently on the market. Postbiotics are an important differentiator, but we don’t want them to overshadow everything else that makes 3pm Afternoon Bites so special. We want people to see us first as a smarter cookie choice and not as a supplement. And since our consumer research found that very few people know what postbiotics are or what they do, leaning on that too much in positioning doesn’t make sense at this time.”
3pm is also very careful to not overstate the product’s capabilities, and for Klinger this is all about maintaining credibility and consumer trust. “We have to be really careful to not overpromise, so I have had a lot of conversations with the marketing team to make sure that we’re talking about postbiotics and the other ingredients in the right way. This is not a magic pill, so we’re not going to sell it as such. I’ve been a dietitian for 40 years and I would never want to betray my audience’s trust by bringing out something that deceives them.”
MARKETING HIGHLIGHTS WELLBEING
3pm’s marketing encompasses much more than what the physical product can do; its communications often go beyond the product and nutrition to include elements such as emotional wellbeing, mindfulness and balance.
“All the products we saw that were sold as better for you, they only talked about the product. They didn’t talk about anything beyond that, except the occasional image of someone doing a sports activity while enjoying the product. That’s why we decided to highlight in marketing concepts like the 3pm slump, work-life balance, an overall balanced lifestyle,” said González-Mir. “During our research we also noticed that people were more open to talking about their emotions and their mental wellbeing. So that became a great tie-in to our broader story about taking that time for yourself to overcome the slump and nourishing yourself.”
3pm’s mission statement is a reflection of this, mentioning both physical and emotional health and encouraging consumers to pause and reset while claiming to be “a wellness platform designed to raise awareness of the inevitable yet widely unrecognized 3pm slump.” The brand connects strongly to the Mood & Mind trend by using lines like “beat the burnout before it begins”, “carpe PM” and, on-pack, “Balanced energy for the rest of your day”.
SAMPLING TO BUILD BRAND AWARENESS
Being a very new brand – the first product only launched in April this year – means that 3pm is going to invest heavily in marketing over the next few months. Marketing efforts have so far been focused mostly on social media, which has proven to be very rewarding, along with SEO and SEM, programmatic digital marketing and display advertising.
“We have the disadvantage of having to spend a lot of our time introducing ourselves,” said González-Mir. “People don’t know us, and of course awareness is a huge deal. So we’re also doing some sampling events and partnerships with influencers to build brand awareness. We’ve created a great product – now we need to build a brand.”
The April launch was a soft launch, which was valuable in some ways, but something they would have done differently given the chance, according to González-Mir.
“At that time we deliberately only had SEO and SEM in place, along with some boosted posts in social. But our full, integrated marketing plan didn’t launch until the beginning of June. We did this to see the sort of ‘before and after’ and we found that during the primary launch we got some good traction, but we weren’t really selling much. Whereas if you compare that to the results we saw in June, when we added paid media and sampling to the mix, it’s like night and day. In retrospect, I would have launched everything at the same time. It’s not like we lost four weeks, but the difference in sales is huge and we realise now that we could have been building awareness while selling.”
3pm is currently selling in the largest grocery chain in Texas, H-E-B, in an area which includes the state’s five biggest cities: Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas. “We decided to launch in a limited area first to throw everything at this, learn from that experience and optimise accordingly before eventually expanding beyond Texas. We’re in talks with other retailers but we want to be able to go with them armed with proof that what we’re doing works. We’re doing it this way instead of having a go everywhere at once. If we had gone for national distribution from the start, we would have firstly needed more seed money and secondly our marketing budget would have been completely diluted.”
The brand is also launching on Amazon this summer as well as bringing out a single-serve SKU to be sold in convenience stores, coffee shops and offices.
