In the world of business, when a door closes for one company it swings wide open for another. There is no better example than the opportunity recently offered to the Maritime potato chip companies Covered Bridge and East Coast Lifestyle.
If you’ve been shopping for snack food at the Superstore over the past several weeks, you may have noticed popular chip brands like Lays and Doritos are nowhere to be found. That’s because the company that makes those chips, Frito-Lay, has been in a pricing dispute with the grocer since February.
The chip manufacturer wants Loblaw-owned outlets to pay more to offset the increased price of ingredients, labour, and transportation. Loblaw won’t do it.
But people still want their chips, so across Canada Loblaw has looked to smaller companies to stock the shelves. The New Brunswick-based Covered Bridge, famous for chips you eat during a snowstorm, is one such company.
Another is East Coast Lifestyle. The brand is best known for its popular hoodies and clothing, but in 2020 founder Alex MacLean and his wife Taylor decided they wanted to expand.
“We were making clothing for nine years and we felt like it would be fun to get into some different niches and areas of the world,” recalled Maclean.
After teaming with Labatt to make a beverage, the next call was to Covered Bridge. After some discussions and 10 different recipes, the two companies launched a sea salt flavoured thick-cut chip.
“Sea salt seemed true to the East Coast brand,” recalled MacLean.” So, it all started out with a fun idea.”
Since then the two Maritime companies have combined for a backyard barbeque flavoured chip, as well as a limited-edition donair flavour (making a comeback in June).
Since 2020, the East Coast Lifestyle brand chips have sold more than 500,000 bags. But that number is going to increase rapidly thanks to the Frito-Lay price war with Loblaw.
“As soon as it happened, we were shocked to hear the whole dispute that was going on,” MacLean recalled. “We talked to Covered Bridge and they said Loblaws were pulling all of the Frito-Lay products and it was a big opportunity for us to get more store displays.”
Since the dispute, the East Coast Lifestyle brand of Covered Bridge chips has entered nearly 40 new Superstore locations in Atlantic Canada. On top of that, Loblaw has introduced East Coast and Covered Bridge to a wider Ontario customer base.
East Coast Lifestyle chip bags can now be found in 35 Fortinos locations across Canada’s most populated province.
MacLean says it’s too early to calculate exactly how much their chip sales have grown since the Frito-Lay dispute with Loblaw, but it’s big enough to have convinced MacLean to increase marketing around their chips.
East Coast Lifestyle has made new promotional videos and photos to push their Covered Bridge chip products.
“We’re really trying to do a lot more marketing videos and photos to tell more of the story behind the whole chip brand,” he said. “We are a very small player in the chip industry, so we’re trying to compete with the big players.”
The Halifax-based company is also entering a new product into the alcoholic beverage market. MacLean didn’t want to give away too many spoilers, but by the end of April, a new East Coast Lifestyle vodka drink will be on liquor store shelves.
East Coast Lifestyle has also put in a big donation to help Ukrainian refugees fleeing war caused by Putin and Russia.
The company has handed 3,000 blankets it had previously manufactured to the international charity World Vision. The blankets, which usually sell for $85 on East Coast’s online shop, will be arriving soon in Romania to help keep refugees warm.
“We don’t have a lot of ways to physically support Ukraine from here in Nova Scotia besides sending supplies over to those in need,” said MacLean, who gave credit to COO Lori MacKenzie for the idea.
“As a company, we have a surplus of blankets right now and we felt the best place for them to go right now is to Ukraine.”
Derek Montague is a reporter with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
