Summer is synonymous with sport, with the Olympics held every four years, Wimbledon, Cricket, and triathlons. Whether you’re into it or not, you can’t quite escape it. So this month on Studio Snack, we’re digging into sporting snacks: the foods that fuel athletes, spectators and… let’s be honest… the slightly less sporty among us.
Biscuits, Bananas & Jelly Babies
For Lydia, the first thing that sprang to mind was Sports Biscuits, so popular that there was a petition when they were discontinued in 2023. Luckily, Aldi and Elkes stepped in to save the day.
Meanwhile, Narcis went for the “serious” stuff: the energy gels, bananas, oats, granola bars, energy balls, peanut butter and mixed nuts that runners and triathletes actually eat. But the real thing is Jelly Babies. Handed out by kids along the Hackney Half route, they are a real amateur running cult.
Lydia’s nerdery corner
As always, Lydia did some snack-related digging:
- Cricket teas: Only cricket stops formally for tea. Clubs pride themselves on the spread, though some cricket teas have evolved with local communities or brought in pizza vans.
- Tennis & Wimbledon: Strawberries and cream have been served from the start, with the BBC reporting around 28,000 kilos eaten each year (plus 7,000 litres of cream).
- Junior sports: Remember orange slices at half-time? Banned in Australia for sugar reasons, but still a classic.
- Stadium oddities: From Colorado dessert nachos and cotton candy burritos to Taipei’s stinky tofu.
- Snack-related British sports: Cheese rolling, pea shooting, black pudding throwing, pancake racing, egg-throwing championships and even stinging nettle eating. Only in Britain…
Learnings from this epidode?
So what do snacks teach us about design and branding? Quite a lot, we decided:
- Sporting snacks evolve with science and culture. Brands can be built to last, yet flexible enough to grow with changing companies and audiences.
- Training for a marathon isn’t just about the race; it’s about the build-up, the fueling, and the constant practice. Branding is the same. Not a sprint, not even a marathon, but an ongoing discipline. You nurture it, keep it in shape, adapt when life (or plantar fasciitis) gets in the way, and always come back to it.
This Month’s Creative Experiment
The brief was to create a half time snack. We both started by redesigning the brief…
Lydia imagined an edible finish line of Welsh cakes for the World Bog Snorkelling Championships.
She also played with sound, drawing a Welsh cake on fun music making tool Beat Blender on Experiments with Google.
Narcis prototyped a jelly baby holder. He eats five sweets every 45 minutes when he runs a half marathon, and it can be fiddly to take out of the wrappers so he saw them on a glove. Not the most hygienic. Early prototypes on AI provided a little “AI-extra thumb” weirdness, but promising.
