Nobody has ever looked genuinely thrilled to eat a raisin. Personally, when I think of a snack, my mind automatically pops to crisps or chocolate, and never to dried fruits. For me, dried fruits are about fifth choice, firmly behind whatever is leftover in the fridge and whatever odd ends are in the chocolate tin. Think of a sultana (stay with me for a second), as a snack they have lots of benefits (antioxidants and natural sugars), they’re easy to eat and they keep you full for longer. Not to mention they’re great for baking and maybe best of all, the ones you have in your cupboard at home seemingly never go off. So why do dried fruits lack the lustre of other snack foods?
Dried Fruits have been a mainstay in cultures and diets for hundreds of years, and therefore they are mostly taken for granted in much of the food world. Within snack foods, much of demand is driven by viral sensations like Dubai Chocolate or decades long marketing campaigns like Walkers or KitKat. Most snack foods are marketed aggressively towards younger consumers, designed to grab attention long enough to secure a purchase. This is one of the drivers in why the snack food industry is so competitive, there are always new snacks to try. Even the biggest hitters in the industry, like Pepsi and Nestle, are always trying new ideas and concepts with their products to keep the attention of the consumer. For example, a few months ago, I noticed that there was a gingerbread Pepsi, and I still think about it today. Products like that may not be around for long, but they generate attention that lasts in people’s memory. It also prompts people to try them, if you like the original flavour, perhaps the new flavour will be even better!
All of this is to say, dried fruits almost completely lack the luxury of grabbing the consumer’s attention and keeping it. People buy dried fruit for a reason, not on a whim. But what dried fruits lack in novelty, they make up for in reliability. Nobody impulse-buys a bag of apricots because they saw a flashy advert during the football, but people do continue buying them year after year because they know exactly what they’re getting. In a strange way, dried fruits suffer from being too dependable. They don’t reinvent themselves every six months, they don’t arrive in “limited edition birthday cake flavour”, and they certainly don’t come with celebrity endorsements. A raisin has been a raisin for centuries, and there is something both admirable and commercially unfortunate about that.
As such, dried fruits fundamentally suffer with an image problem. Typically, snack foods have thrived on indulgence and excitement, whereas dried fruits are often framed as sensible. They have carved out a spot in the public consciousness alongside muesli and herbal tea; foods that are ‘good for you’ rather than foods you crave. The excitement of getting sweets as a child is subconsciously carried on into adulthood, but what child is excited when given a prune?
Dried fruits lack marketing. They fit perfectly into the way many people actually want to eat today, but very few consider them when looking for a health conscious snack food. They are portable, long-lasting, relatively unprocessed, and naturally sweet without requiring an ingredients list that reads like a chemistry experiment. As more people become conscious of ultra-processed foods and endless artificial additives, dried fruits suddenly seem less old-fashioned and more quietly ahead of their time. Dates, for example, have become increasingly popular as a natural sweetener in protein bars and desserts, while dried apricots and banana chips have found their way into the gym bag demographic that would once have ignored them entirely.
Perhaps dried fruits don’t need to become the next viral snack craze. Maybe their appeal lies in the fact that they have survived every food trend imaginable without really changing at all. Long after the gingerbread Pepsi disappears from shelves and the latest novelty crisp flavour is forgotten, there will still be raisins in cupboards across the country, waiting patiently to be baked into something or absent-mindedly eaten by the handful. That kind of staying power is difficult to market, but it is probably worth appreciating. So next time you’re looking for a quick snack, spare a thought for the raisins in your cupboard. You know they’re still good.