It’s a great time to make snack and bakery your home. Analysts report that more than half of all eating occasions are now snacks. Multiple segments of bakery continue to annually find new levels of strength. And if you merge these two industries into the “bakery snacks” product segment, a nice synergy emerges: IRI data shows bakery snacks, now a $2.2 billion segment, are up more than 10% in dollar sales over the past year.

Our pursuits remain wide-ranging. Health-and-wellness and better-for-you continually find themselves smartly balanced with indulgence—sometimes in the same product. New uses for ancient and diverse grains enter the picture as manufacturers and consumers seek more gluten-free solutions. Increased nutritional and processing functionality walk hand-in-hand with appealing flavor and mouthfeel. Manufacturers and engineers seek strategies for better plant efficiency without sacrifices to signature product attributes and time-tested quality.

Countless permutations of the wide-ranging formulation criteria we pluck from the ether can potentially resonate with consumers. It’s a crowded game, and the rules always change.

But opportunities for growth continually avail themselves in this game. It’s often just a matter of honing a finely acute perspective.

We all face a continual onslaught of challenges, along with opportunities lying in wait—often on a daily basis. Such is the nature of our existence. It’s how we surmount those challenges and capitalize on new opportunities—growing despite adversity—that collectively separates the wheat from the chaff, providing fodder for bona-fide business success stories.

As you might have already heard, Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery—a brand that has proudly and successfully served the snack and bakery industries for more than 100 years—recently made a strategic staffing move to usher in a new era of growth for the brand. These carefully planned moves were solely designed to bring newfound strength to an already-strong brand.

Over the next several weeks, we will unveil multiple initiatives designed to grow the Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery brand into new areas. We’ll implement new levels of leading-edge, data-driven tools and expert analysis to anchor our trend-based coverage. You’ll see a greater diversity of industry voices—everything from market analysis to ingredient research and equipment design—within our content. And you’ll notice the impact of stronger and broader connections to key, trusted industry organizations and associations at work across the board, synergies that will reveal altogether new paths of content development. We’ll also reveal new informational destinations on our website, www.snackandbakery.com, that provide “big picture” looks at key growth segments within snack and bakery while simultaneously outlining the specifics in an instantly accessible format. And, starting in 2015, we’ll begin dispatching monthly emailed reports highlighting the new products, ingredients, packaging and equipment that you need to know about—along with the latest related insight and analysis—with each one spotlighting a major snack and bakery category.

The objective of these myriad efforts is simple: to help you stay in the know as you grow your snack and bakery businesses to newfound heights of success. These additional initiatives only bring new dynamics to the great content you have already come to expect from Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery, helping folks throughout snack and bakery—manufacturers, marketers, ingredient suppliers, packaging firms, food safety and QA/QC specialists, regulatory advisors, plant-efficiency experts, equipment manufacturers, and many more—to better accomplish their day-to-day business goals.

 Together, we will expand the reach of our current horizons, collectively rising to the ongoing challenge of delivering superb snack and bakery products that meet—and exceed—the ever-shifting wants and needs of the American consumer.