Hey! Chips is best known for its range of crunchy whole vegetable snacks, having opted to move away from conventional extruded snacks to establish a ‘whole ingredient’ unique selling point.
All its products are clean label with no sugar or preservatives added, and a standard ingredient list of just two to three items.
“With our crunchy snacks range having hit its stride and finding entry into all the premium supermarkets in Singapore, we wanted to create something even more unique but still true to our clean label ideology,” Hey! Chips Founder and CEO Emily Chu told FoodNavigator-Asia at the recent Food and Hotel Asia (FHA) 2025 event in Singapore.
“Consumers today are really on the lookout for new experiences and textures so the idea was to innovate based on unique mouthfeel, and in the course of our research we tried multiple different product formats with multiple textures but found that many of these were not produceable at scale without the use of chemical ingredients.
“The fruit bites came about when we tried focusing on a melt-in-your-mouth consistency, a texture that is commonly found in children’s yoghurt bites but much less so in adult snacks.
“In order to make these clean label according to our requirements, everything is done from scratch – we ferment our own yoghurt from New Zealand full-cream milk and hand-cut all the fruits before combining these and freeze drying, ending up with a naturally sweet, melty fruit snack.”
These fruit bites only contain fruits and yoghurt, with fruit content up to 40%. Four flavours are currently available: Strawberry, Mixed Berries, Mango Passion and Mango Banana.
“Although these are similar to kids’ yoghurt bites and are definitely suitable for their consumption, we are targeting a much wider population with these fruit bites,” she added.
“The melty texture means these are safe for young children and elderly consumers alike, and for the general adult consumer it is a more unique texture and mouthfeel compared to regular fruit snacks.
“We are looking to fill that mid-day snack consumption occasion for all ages, and between the savoury, crunchy vegetable chips and sweet, melty fruit bites, this ensures that there is an option to fulfil every craving.”
Hey! Chips fruit bites have been launched exclusively in Singapore Cold Storage supermarkets as of April 2025 at a retail price of SG$4.99 (US$3.73) per 20g pack.
A new category of snack
A major issue faced by novel products such as Hey! Chips’ when it comes to physical retail has been in terms of categorisation, as these do not fall into any of the conventional categories.
“We already faced this with the vegetable snacks as it was a common dilemma across all the supermarkets from Cold Storage to FairPrice Finest,” she said.
“Our use of whole ingredients means that it is not exactly a ‘chip’ like regular potato or corn chips, but also not exactly a ‘nut’ item so don’t really fall into either of those aisles in the supermarket.
“For the fruit bites, the dilemma was taken a step further because it is not targeted at children so can’t be in the children’s aisle; it is sweet so can’t be in the savoury snacks aisle, and its processing means it’s not just a preserved fruit so can’t be in that aisle either.
“Eventually we decided that it will go with the fruits for now, but essentially we now know that we have created a new category of snack with enormous potential and definitely plan to continue our innovation efforts along this vein and beyond.”
