The account-manager recommendation is not to change the candy. It is to make the advantage visible before shoppers reach the aisle.

Brookside pairs dark chocolate with exotic fruit-juice centers, such as goji, acai, blueberry and pomegranate, to create great-tasting treats, while delivering the benefits of flavanols and antioxidants.

John P. Bilbrey, Hershey President & CEO, December 2011

We're pleased that a company of Hershey's stature and excellence appreciates Brookside's growth, brand equity and people, as well as the great taste and potential of the Brookside product line.

Ken Shaver, Brookside Foods President & CEO (CSP Daily News, 2011)

Per the client's RFP, Brookside should be treated as consumer-facingly independent from Hershey. The campaign keeps the Hershey connection out of shopper-facing copy.

• Denis McGuire · Lead inventor. Filed the patent application March 2000.
• Edward Richard De Haan · Co-inventor. Brookside Foods, Ltd.
• Robert Hodge Clark · Co-inventor. Brookside Foods, Ltd.

They built the process the brand still runs on. The town that made it no longer makes the chocolate.

Price is the opening.

Less than half of Hu. About a quarter of SkinnyDipped. Cheaper than the supposedly mass-friendly Unreal. (Hu Kitchen, 2025) (Forbes, 2023) (Unreal Snacks, 2025)

Cocoa hit roughly $13,000 per tonne in late 2024 and settled to about $3,079 in February 2026. J.P. Morgan projects a $6,000 long-term baseline. Every brand on this list is paying more for the same input, and Brookside still comes in cheapest. (Trading Economics, 2026)

The dark chocolate market is projected to grow from $6.31B in 2026 to $10.18B by 2034 at a 6.16% CAGR. Better-for-you snacks go from $48.6B to $71.3B by 2030. The category Brookside sits in keeps getting bigger every year. (Fortune Business Insights, 2025) (Global Industry Analysts, 2025)

Awareness is the leak.

Brookside has 86 posts, 5,738 followers, and no Instagram activity after July 1, 2020. Hu has 57x more reach. SkinnyDipped has 23x. The product advantage is real; the audience signal is missing.

Hu Chocolate

329K followers

$2.03/oz

Founded 2012 NYC. Acquired by Mondelez in January 2021. Sold in 34,000+ stores. "No Weird Ingredients. Ever." The clean-label benchmark of the category. Hu also offers a Taste Guarantee, refunding customers who do not like the product. (Hu Kitchen, 2025) (Mondelez International, 2021)

Opportunity: Brookside can own fruit-first chocolate at a price Hu cannot match.

SkinnyDipped

134K followers

$3.14/oz

Founded 2016 Seattle by Val and Breezy Griffith, a mother-daughter team. Built around the "thin dip" model and a $25,000 Female Founder Fund. (SkinnyDipped, 2025) (Forbes, 2023)

Opportunity: Brookside can offer fruit, chocolate, and resealable sharing without SkinnyDipped's price jump.

Unreal Candy

125K followers

$1.79/oz

Founded 2011. Clean-label peanut butter cups, gems, pretzels. Tom Brady, Gisele, and Matt Damon backed the relaunch in 2014. Mission: "Unjunk the world." (Unreal Snacks, 2025)

Opportunity: Brookside can compete on price while owning a more adult fruit-and-dark-chocolate flavor profile.

The honest weakness.

Brookside is cheaper for a reason. Corn syrup is the third ingredient by weight, and a serving carries 24g of sugar. Next to a Hu bar that prints "No Weird Ingredients. Ever." on the front, the back of a Brookside bag does not win a clean-label argument. The campaign keeps that fight off the table and leans on what the product actually does better: real fruit juice centers, dark chocolate, and a price that makes trial easy.

Why creators do the heavy lifting.

Influencer marketing returns $5.20 for every $1 spent, 86% of consumers say they buy from influencer recommendations, and 76% of company leaders are increasing influencer budgets in 2026. For a brand with no working social account and no DTC site, that is the cheapest way to put a first bite in front of the right shopper. (Sprout Social, 2025)

The opportunity is not persuasion from zero. People like the product once they understand it.

Campaign objective: lift aided awareness from 25% to 45% in the target segment during the eight-week holiday flight. The creative does not need to change the product; it needs to make the product easier to recognize and try.

Why holiday. The NCA reports that winter holidays generate $7.5 billion in candy sales, holiday seasons account for 65% of total chocolate purchases, and 72% of consumers say they gift chocolate for special occasions. The Dec 25 deadline lines up with the single biggest chocolate-buying window in the U.S. (NCA, 2024-2025)

Survey N=16, plus 3 in-depth interviews. Los Angeles and Seattle.

The path is shelf, then phone, then back to shelf. Skip any of those three and the campaign breaks.

The 25-to-44 segment is open to new products, but not blindly. A new snack needs one of three permissions: it shows up in-store when they're already shopping, a creator makes the first bite feel low-risk, or the price makes the experiment feel harmless. Brookside currently has the shelf and the price. The campaign supplies the social proof.

The quotes point to one barrier: shoppers avoid unknown snacks when the risk feels higher than the reward. “Gross” is not just taste. It means wasting money, calories, and a snack moment on something that did not earn the try. Brookside has to lower that risk before the aisle. (Primary interviews, February 2026)

The chocolate you want, with the fruit you can actually taste.

Surprisingly Delicious still works. The update is sharper: Brookside is not better-for-you theater; it is real fruit, dark chocolate, and a price that makes trial easy. The campaign promise becomes: the treat you can say yes to before you overthink it. Sarah does not need Brookside to become her personality. She needs it to make Tuesday afternoon feel a little less like Tuesday. (Hersheyland Canada, 2025) (Hu Kitchen, 2025)

If your audience is on the For You page and your competitors are not, you don't need a bigger budget. You need 9 creators and 8 weeks.

Plan: 9 micro-creators with 10K to 50K followers in food/snack niches. Each posts one taste-test video plus two Stories at a $550 flat fee. Reach estimate: 900K to 1.35M, based on food-content benchmarks and creator-rate sources. (NCA & Circana, 2026) (Kyra, 2026)

The reach math. TikTok's algorithm pushes content to non-followers through the For You page, so a safe estimate for a food micro-creator with 25K-40K followers is 3x to 4x the follower count per video, or roughly 100K-150K views each. Effective CPM lands at $3.67 to $5.50 per thousand impressions. (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2026)

What got cut. Traditional media did not survive the budget. Nothing in the survey or secondary data justified TV, radio, or print at $7,500. TikTok Shop was also ruled out because Brookside's path to purchase is in-store at Target and Costco, not online. The campaign builds awareness toward a shelf, not an e-commerce channel that does not exist for the brand yet.

• 25K to 40K followers
• 6%+ engagement rate (above the 5.60% food content average)
• Posts taste-test or snack review content at least twice a week
• Audience is 60%+ ages 18 to 34
• 70%+ U.S. based
• At least 55% female
• No competing chocolate brand partnerships in the last 90 days

Target the snack reviewer who already films Target finds, not the polished wellness influencer.

The two filters that matter most are engagement and audience fit: creators need enough daily food content to make the recommendation feel native, and enough 18-to-34 U.S. reach to overlap with the shopper segment. (Kyra, 2026) (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2026) (SipCollab, 2026)

Instagram is the reminder layer. Reels create the second exposure, Stories nudge trial, and the carousel gives shoppers something to save before the aisle. It is cheaper than TikTok per piece, lower reach ceiling, but better suited to save-and-screenshot behavior. (InfluenceFlow, 2026) (Loopex Digital, 2026)

The Instagram role. 4 micro-creators, 1 Reel, 2 Stories each, and a gift-guide carousel timed for late holiday shoppers. (SponsorRate, 2026)

The reach math. Reels reach 55% non-followers through Explore and the Reels tab, so a safe estimate for a 25K-40K creator is 1.5x to 2x the follower count per Reel, or 50K-75K views each. Effective CPM lands at $5.33 to $8.00 per thousand impressions. (Loopex Digital, 2026)

Why these colors and not others. Su and Wang found that warm tones like berry red increase purchase intent through perceived fluency: shoppers process the product faster and respond more positively. Steiner and Florack's review found green is the color most strongly linked to healthfulness and nature, which is why leaf shows up only in real-fruit callouts and never as the dominant color. Brown anchors the system in natural, premium territory without leaning clinical. (Su & Wang, 2024) (Steiner & Florack, 2023)

(Koby, 2023) (Nagy & Temesi, 2024)

(May, 2025)

real fruit juice centers, dark chocolate, and somehow not a sad wellness snack. found it at Target for $6.29 and yes, i am bringing it everywhere.

#Brookside #DarkChocolate #HolidaySnacking #RealFruit #TreatYourself

Hashtag tiers.

• Branded: #BrooksideChocolate · #DaringlyDifferent
• Niche: #DarkChocolate · #GlutenFreeSnacks · #SuperfoodSnack · #FruitAndChocolate · #RealFruitJuice
• Trending / discovery: #ChocolateLovers · #HolidayTreats · #StockingStuffers · #SnackTok · #TreatYourself

Later's 2025 data found that 3-5 highly relevant hashtags outperform 20-30 generic ones; Sprout Social recommends 3-4 per TikTok. Each post pulls a small mix from the three tiers with #BrooksideChocolate as the consistent anchor.

Subject: Brookside for your next Target snack run?

Hi Influencer,

Your Target snack reviews are exactly where Brookside should show up: quick, honest, and built around the "is this actually worth buying?" moment.

We'd like to send you Brookside Dark Chocolate Pomegranate and Acai & Blueberry for a short taste-test video. Each piece has a real fruit juice center, dark chocolate, 130 calories per serving, gluten-free, and a Target price around $6.

The ask: one 15-second TikTok in your own style. No script, no forced talking points, just the first bite and whether it earns a spot in the cart. We can offer product plus a flat fee, with an affiliate code if you want one.

Interested? I can send the brief and ship both bags this week.