Welcome Mars Wrigley to the IGA Family!

For more than 30 years, IGA’s Red Oval Family has brought together a wide range of manufacturers and service providers with products and services that help IGA independent retailers and the IGA brand grow and thrive. Today we are thrilled to announce that Mars Wrigley has joined the IGA family as a Red Oval Partner, bringing a myriad of popular products and valuable category insights. 

"We are so excited to bring Mars Wrigley into the IGA Red Oval family," says IGA Vice President of Business Partnerships Heidi Huff. "Shoppers and retailers alike are going to love the sweet offers that this partnership will bring to our National Digital Ad, as well as insights to a category that has grown during the pandemic."

Huff spoke to Rachel Grua, Mars Wrigley's customer business lead for SuperValu/UNFI to learn more about their product innovations, why they're excited to work with IGA retailers, and how they're helping stores and shoppers during the pandemic. 

Can you tell our retailers what makes Mars Wrigley products different from your competitors?

Mars Wrigley is a family-owned business for over 100 years, like many of the IGA independents.

How is Mars Wrigley focusing on product innovations? 

Mars Wrigley is focusing on innovating around our top brands and emerging trends this year with launches supporting M&M’s, Snickers, and Skittles! We are extremely excited about our new M&M’s Mix, Snickers Brownie and Skittles Gummi items. M&M's is the #1 brand in the category, with culturally relevant characters and fun campaigns that appeal to everyone.

What is Mars Wrigley doing to help retailers and shoppers during the pandemic? 

Mars is staying on the forefront of the new trends and helping retailers understand dynamic shifts in consumer behavior due to the pandemic. To help retailers, we have several data sources around digital and how to partner with us to help drive category sales online.

We are also committed to improving the gum category as we’re the #1 shareholder, we have a portfolio of iconic brands, invest over $40M in advertising support annually, and are a driver of retailer profitability. It’s important that we work together as gum and mints is a very large, profitable category that is important to retailers and shoppers. 

How do you plan to help IGA retailers increase their sales in the candy and snacks categories? 

We’d like to partner with IGA retailers to offer promotions, like in the National Digital Ad, that support categories that have suffered through the pandemic and also highlight new innovation that will help increase sales and also increase the velocities of our core product, thus improving the overall category. We’d also like to help retailers understand the importance of confectionery in their stores and understand the different need states of their consumers that confectionery can help meet.