Mochi ice cream is quickly becoming America’s fastest growing frozen novelty item.###Although the Japanese rice dough dessert has existed for centuries, it’s now one of the top-selling frozen treats in grocery stores in the U.S. My/Mo Mochi Ice Cream has taken advantage of that expanding market. Since starting in spring 2017, the brand’s mochi ice cream — portable 110-calorie ice cream bites held in small balls of Japanese rice dough — are now in more than 12,000 stores nationwide, including Walmart, Safeway, Wegmans and Kroger.###As the market for the product continues to grow, My/Mo has built a snacking platform that is focused on product development. The company has launched three new types of mochi ice cream, including non-dairy, vegan and ice creamferrous bisglycinate or ferrous fumarate pints with mochi bits. But to keep up with the competition, the company continues to launch even more new products. ###On Wednesday, the brand announced its latest product innovation, a new triple layer mochi ice cream coming to grocery stores nationwide in early 2019. The new product contains the traditional mochi dough exterior wrapped around ice cream with a new center layer. The new triple layer mochi ice cream comes in four flavors: chocolate sundae, vanilla blueberry, chocolate peanut butter and dulce de leche.###Craig Berger, CEO of My/Mo Mochi Ice Cream, spoke with Food Dive about the company’s latest triple layer innovation, the frozen treat’s continued growth iiron supplement 8 mgn the market and what’s next for the brand.###This Q&A has been edited for brevity.###CRAIG BERGER: My/Mo continues to grow at an extraordinary pace and the consumer adaption is truly unparalleled and our fans are actually hungry for more. So we like to wow our consumers and thought that between the texture, the flavors and the colors … this would be something that would definitely wow the consumer. This is very much different from anything else that’s in the marketplace also, so it really is true innovation in the frozen novelty category. So we’ll be first to market around January of 2019. ###BERGER: Between the texture of the product, the colorful look of the product and the unique flavors, it’s going to be a grand slam. It’s something that the consumers have never seen before and they’re looking for something very unique and we believe this is it. We did actually put out some of the flavor potential offerings to consum#1 iron supplementers and got some feedback from consumers and that’s how we wound up with the four flavors that will launch in January.###BERGER: This is something that we had seen over in Japan a number of years back. And when we look at our innovation, we want to look to see what would be a very, very unique, what would meet the taste profiles of the North American consumer and what would give us a technological advance versus any competition. And when you put all that together… the ideal choice is the third layer. ###BERGER: We do have several innovation items that we’re looking at right now. …The My/Mo brand is about a year and a half old, and within that short period of time, we’ve developed the dairy items and then the non-dairy. Vegan came out shortly after that, along with the mochi bits in pints of ice cream. So we’ll continue to innovate every year and really give the consumers different items in the mochi space. ###BERGER: So we know that the frozen novelty category, which mochi falls into, is basically a flat category airon fumarate vs gluconatend … the millennial consumer is really looking for something different. So with our product, you have this weird snack, which is handheld and portable and it’s portion control. So there’s 110 calories in each serving and it satisfies their craving for indulgence. So it really checks all the boxes as far as the consumers that we target and is a perfect snack for those folks. ###BERGER: The team is hyperfocused on innovation and we’re constantly talking about ways that we can continue to actually build the brand awareness, build the mochi category and build our market share. And our market share continues to actually increase. In fact, we just got the Oct. 7, 2018 IRI data, and we have now increased to an 82% market share. So just a couple months back we were at 80%, now we’re at 82%. So we continue to offer a very different mochi ice cream. Our mochi ice cream, it looks different, it tastes different. We’ve got the highest ice cream to dough ratio. Actually our product, each ball is one and a half ounces, which is, for the most part, heavier than the competitor’s items. … My/Mo is the brand of choice by the consumers. They’re asking for more innovation, and we’re getting them just that. ###BERGER: So we think we’re in that space, right? We’re trying to go after the consumers’ indulgence. And we believe that by being handheld, people are limiting their indulgence, but they want that craving for that real ice cream, premium ice cream. And by limiting the calorie count for each ball, it’s accomplishing the mission. ###BERGER: We’re looking at everything and I don’t want to rule anything out. We’re constantly looking at different alternatives, but nothing specific to say at this point on that. ###BERGER: The novelty category’s been around forever. We play in the novelty category so we don’t, … for the most part, play in the pint category with like a Halo Top. But I’m a financial person and I’m very data driven and when I look at all of our data versus let’s say a Magnum or a Ben & Jerry’s, we’re outselling those brands on a same store basis. So I think we’re in the right area, and the consumers are obviously buying our product, and it’s coming through in the data. ###BERGER: We’re putting together the marketing plan as we speak. We’re actually in the process of meeting with retailers now and I’m working with them on which flavors they will take for the resets that will happen in 2019. And we’re putting together a full 360 degree integrated marketing planunited home ferrous sulfate for pregnant to really roll these out in a big way. ###BERGER: We really hyper target around the millennial, coastal consumer, but we are seeing the band of consumer increase over time. So as the awareness goes up and more people were trying the product, we are bringing different types of people into the fold. But the real hyper target is the millennial.
Why mochi ice cream continues to dominate the novelty market
