Chupa Chups

Spain's Chupa Chups S.A. (pronounced 'shoopa shoop,' it comes from the Spanish verb 'chupar,' to lick) is the world's leading manufacturer and distributor of lollipops. The company's famed logo--designed by Salvador Dali&mdashorns the company extensive line of lollipops, featuring more than 50 different flavors and flavor combinations and sold in a variety of packaging, from traditional lollipops, to motorized lollipops and tubes, cans and other specially designed packaging, such as the Mobile Pop shaped like a cellular phone and featuring a functional calculator, or the Chupa + Surprise, introduced in 2000, which bundles snap-together toys with the company's lollipops. In the 1990s, Chupa Chups, which takes credit for providing the well-known prop for famous 1970s television detective Kojak, branched out from its long-held lollipop specialty to introduce products directed at new markets. The company's Crazy Planet subsidiary creates a line of value-added candy, lollipop, and toy products, geared particularly to the children's and adolescent markets, including Crazy Zoo, which features a toy inside a chocolate egg, and the Gum Watch, a wristwatch chewing gum dispenser. Chupa Chups has also launched its first line of products targeting the adult market, the Smint range of flavored breath mints. Chupa Chups sells its products in more than 160 countries, with production facilities in Spain, France, Russia, Mexico, and China. Some 93 percent of its sales, which reached Pta 73 billion (US$445 million) in 1999, are generated outside of Spain. A privately held company, Chupa Chups is led by founder, President, and CEO Xavier Bernat.

Sticking to Success

The predecessor company to Chupa Chups S.A. was founded in 1946 as Granja Asturias S.A. Originally specializing in apple-based sweets, the small Asturias-based company nearly folded in the early 1950s. That was when Enrique Bernat--the grandson of a Barcelona candymaker--joined the company and set to work transforming the artisan operation into a production giant capable of manufacturing and distributing its products across the world. By the late 1950s, Bernat had succeeding in turning the company around--and received 50 percent of the company for his efforts in 1958. Bernat decided to buy out the rest of the company, and then transform it entirely.

During the decade, Bernat had begun investigating a new product idea. Recognizing the majority of Spain's candies were being consumed by children, Bernat sought to create a product specifically for this market. Most candies at the time were traditional sugar-based drops--which tended to produce a sticky mess in children's hands. Bernat's idea was simple: he began inserting sticks into the candies--originally a piece of metal&mdashø function as a handle, or, as Bernat himself said, 'like eating a sweet on a fork.' Bernat eventually named his candy the Chups, after the Spanish verb 'chupar,' or 'to lick.'

The candy quickly became all the rage among Asturias's children, and its success encouraged Bernat to take a drastic step. After gaining full control of the company, Bernat decided to eliminate the company's range of some 200 different candies to concentrate solely on its lollipop. The first Chups were launched in 1958, available in seven flavors, and selling for one peseta apiece--considered expensive for the time.

Expensive or not, the Chups took off across the country. Bernat had quickly industrialized the company's production, enabling the company to meet the rising demand for the lollipops. Already by the end of the 1950s the company was delivering up to 200,000 lollipops per day, using its own fleet of trucks. Meanwhile, the company continued to refine its sole product, replacing the metal sticks with wooden sticks, which were in turn replaced with plastic in the early 1960s. An important refinement came in 1961, when the company changed the lollipop's name to the more musical-sounding Chupa Chups, and it was under this name that the lollipop was to achieve international domination.

The success of the Chupa Chups brand led Bernat to change the company's name to that of its flagship line in 1964. Rising sales, and preparations to take the company international, encouraged Bernat to open a second factory, in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires, outside of Barcelona, in 1967. That factory helped support the company's launch of its first subsidiary, in Perpignan, France, in that same year.

A major moment in the Chupa Chups brand history came in 1969 when the company adopted a new logo. For this, Bernat turned to friend--and world-renowned surrealist painter--Salvador Dali, who quickly devised the company's daisy-shaped logo and bright colors. The association of Dali's name with the still small Chupa Chups company gave it a great deal of international attention, enabling the company to penetrate new markets. In that same year, the company built its first foreign production facility, in Bayonne, France. The company's sales still remained predominantly Spanish, however; in 1970, just ten percent of the company's lollipops were sold outside of Spain.

Ten years later, the company had entirely transformed itself and its sales--by 1980, some 90 percent of all sales were made outside of Spain. The company could also celebrate the sale of its ten billionth lollipop sold. Supporting the booming growth in the company's sales was its rollout in Japan in 1977. The 1970s had also given the company an enormous boost in publicity when its lollipops were adopted by actor Telly Savalas as a prop for his character Kojak. Worldwide television audiences watched Kojak's ever-present Chupa Chups every week. The company was to continue to benefit from such public relations coups, as a means to compete against the mammoth advertising budgets of its large-scale competitors, such as Nestlé, Hershey, Cadbury, Haribo, and others.