Funday have found the sweet spot! After frustration with the lack of healthy lollies on the market, Founder Daniel Kitay took to the kitchen. Deliciously natural lollies packed with gut-loving goodies, no added sugar or sugar alcohols, and bursting with fresh juicy flavours. The new natural lolly brand that is cleaning up the confectionary aisle.
1. How did the Funday journey begin?
The FUNDAY journey began due to my frustration with the lack of healthy lollies in the market. I was avoiding the confectionery aisle all together and even the health food aisle lacked any good lolly options. On the one hand, there was full sugar lollies (organic or non-organic), and on the other hand sugar-free lollies, all of which contained huge concentrations of sugar-alcohols. Of course, while the sugar-free options sounded luring, they all had to claim “excess consumption may cause a laxative effect” and sure enough, after 1 or 2 gummy products, I couldn’t tolerate the stomach pain and effects. I thought there that to be another way and began formulating with different types of lollies with natural sweeteners and fibres at home. After hundreds of trials, I ended up developing what is now FUNDAY Natural Sweets.
2. How does Funday Natural Sweets differ from other natural lolly brands?
Unlike almost all lolly brands, we contain ingredients that are good for you! A serving size (one bag of 50g) contains 7 grams of prebiotics. Our lollies have no sugar added, no sugar alcohols as we use ingredients like tapioca fibre and chicory root fibre.
All of our colours and flavours are natural, and are derived from ingredients like beetroot, spirulina and turmeric. We are gluten free, either 5 or 4.5 health star rated, two products are certified vegan by Vegan Australia and 100% Australian Owned.
3. The range includes some delicious flavours, which is your favourite SKU?.
I LOVE them all obviously, but I am a sucker for sour vegan gummy bears. I love the sour formulation we’ve come up with (which doesn’t contain any sugar!) but the raspberry, lemon and apple flavours combined with the sour is incredible. I also love how the vegan bears are a bit chewy, so it lasts longer in your mouth and the flavour is more intense!
4. Can you talk us through your sustainable manufacturing processes and its positive impact on the environment?
As we’ve become a more substantial business, our impact on the environment has become a bigger talking point within the business. We’re proud that our manufacturing is completely carbon neutral. All edible waste goes into animal feed. We have also signed up to APCO so our packets are store-drop off recyclable, our trays and outer packaging are 100% recyclable, we use vegetable and soy based inks. As a business, we are always looking at ways to become more sustainable and welcome feedback from our customers all the time on how to improve.
5. What does the term ‘wellness’ mean to you and how to you adopt wellness in your day to day?
Wellness is a very broad term and can be easily overused. I take wellness to be an overarching term that considers how a person is coping physically and mentally. Both physical and mental wellness are inter-connected and as the Founder and leader of FUNDAY it is my job to manage my own wellness but also the wellness of the team around me.
6. What has been the most challenging part of building the Funday brand?
It’s very challenging being a start up business in a $1.4b confectionery industry with huge multinational businesses around you with huge budgets. The biggest challenge is always having to think differently, i.e. if you don’t have those million dollar budgets, how do we launch a successful brand, and product and still be successful? So it’s always having to be creative and innovative… but that’s the part myself and the team LOVE… it’s what keeps us going. Rather than just signing over a million dollars to an agency to execute a campaign, we’re in the ‘trenches’ building an awesome, delicious and fun brand!
7. What has your experience with GBN been like?
Our experience with GBN has been really great so far! We saw immediate growth after signing an agreement. The service and communication has been at our high service levels, and we’re looking forward to building a long-term partnership with the entire GBN team.