Candy's growth moved to chew. The equipment didn't.

Non-chocolate was about a third of US confectionery in 2015, and by 2025 it had reached 40.9%.

Seven points of category share in a decade sounds modest until you attach a dollar figure, which is $4.1 billion of growth since 2020 alone: a 41% increase over five years. Those numbers come from the NCA's 2026 State of Treating, which combines Circana retail measurement with Euromonitor data and the association's own consumer survey.

For scale, US confectionery closed 2025 at $55 billion, with $42.5 billion of that sitting in the Circana-measured retail marketplace — grocery, mass, club, convenience, drug and dollar — up 5.3% in dollars.

The changes that impacted share moves of that size don’t come from one good year, but from what people reach for, that sustained long enough to reset where the category’s growth lives.

Where the growth actually went

Gen Z and Millennials over-index for gummy, chewy and freeze-dried, per the same NCA work, and that detail matters more than it first appears: it tells you the growth didn't arrive through a new flavor or through better chocolate, but from formats or textures people choose by how they chew.

The direction is also softer than most people assume: Nestlé USA published its 2026 trends read in November and describes creamy textures appearing on 45% of menus, with social mentions of "velvety" rising 40% quarter over quarter, while treating the #CrunchTok cycle, which pulled more than 1.5 billion views the previous year, as something that already peaked.

With these together, the picture sharpens that people are choosing on mouthfeel, that is soft and pliable rather than hard and snapping.

Nerds Gummy Clusters is the example the industry keeps returning to, and it holds up. What made that product work wasn't an innovative product, it was wrapping a crunchy shell around a gummy centre so the thing delivers two textures in a single bite, bringing innovation in the format.

Chew is equipment

Here's where the category conversation usually stops and the operational one should start.

Gummy, chewy and freeze-dried are three separate manufacturing processes, and none of them runs on a chocolate line. A plant built to temper, mould and enrobe chocolate cannot produce gummies by adjusting a recipe, because the two operations share almost nothing past the loading dock. Different equipment, different handling, different everything.

Which means the $4.1 billion that migrated since 2020 flowed into a kind of capacity the confectionery industry was barely running in 2015. Somebody had to build it, taking capital expenditure and years rather than a reformulation cycle.

That has a consequence most trend pieces skip: plants able to run these formats at commercial scale are a narrower group than what the opportunity implies and the companies that moved early are holding those slots now.

So, if you’re a chocolate business watching non-chocolate take seven points of your category, probably it’s access to a line that can make what you designed that is constraining your response time.

Who this favours

Emerging brands have an advantage here that's easy to miss, because they were never carrying chocolate assets in the first place. A founder starting today picks the format that fits the opportunity and then finds a plant, without a factory full of tempering equipment arguing for a different answer.

Established chocolate businesses face the harder version, as they have capital tied up in lines built for a format losing share, and the natural response for extending into gummy or chewy runs straight into capacity questions. Buying or contracting a gummy manufacturer can solve it, which is part of why the category has been actively in acquisitions.

Neither position is fatal. But they lead to different first moves, and confusing them wastes a planning cycle.

The counterweight

None of this is happening inside a category that's simply expanding.

Among households with a GLP-1 user, 61% report buying fewer sweets, according to PwC's survey using Numerator data. Confectionery is under occasion pressure at the same moment it's changing shape, so the category is shrinking in frequency while getting more demanding about what each occasion has to deliver.

That combination raises the stakes on format rather than lowering them. When somebody buys candy less often, whatever they do buy has to justify the occasion (and "worth it" is increasingly settled by texture instead of by flavour alone).

What this changes if you're planning a launch

The sequence also matters more than it used to.

Flavour stays adjustable late, because you can iterate on a flavour system deep into development and switching one costs a reformulation rather than a new partner. Texture behaves differently, since the format you choose determines which plants can make your product at all.

Deciding on a soft chew after you've already shortlisted manufacturers usually means starting the shortlist over.

So, the order that saves the most time runs: settle the format, find the plants that already run it, then develop flavour inside the constraints you actually have.

To find the plants that run your desired format, you can use our services to do so. GrowinCo. works with several contract manufacturers to solve problems on new formulations, expansions, cost reductions and much more. We track roughly 80% of new food and beverage launches worldwide, making the bridge between your brand and who can run your products.

Get the 12 questions we would ask a manufacturer before the first conversation →