The Hottest Snacks on the Market Are Dates?

EDITORS NOTE: Attn: Calif.); (ART ADV: With photos.

Greg Willsey wasn’t sure sour watermelon-dusted dates made much sense. But as a founder of Joolies, a snack brand best known for its bags of plain Medjool dates, he’d noticed that competitors and home cooks alike were starting to get a little weird with the fruit. A candy-inspired approach might work as a sort of Trojan horse to getting his company’s fresh fruit on more shelves.

“Some people, myself included, were skeptical that it would work,” he said. When Joolies previewed its Date Sours in March at Expo West, an annual trade show of emerging food brands, the product was just one of 250 date-based items on the floor.

“We started seeing dates pop up two or three years ago, as an ingredient used in place of stevia and allulose,” said Adrienne Smith, Expo West’s director of content. “But this year was all about embracing the date itself. They really exploded as a snack.”

At the show, dates appeared in “every format you could possibly imagine,” including coated in candy shell, mashed into birthday cake-flavored balls and used as a sweetener in soda. “I think it’s funny. You look at a date and think, how could people possibly innovate with this? Yet somehow they did.”

Once the purview of specialty shops and health food co-ops, dates have become a supermarket darling. Wrinkled, dusky and the size of a thumb, the fruit may not be an obvious packaged-snack superstar. But a number of brands are transforming malleable dates in ways big and small to appeal to more fiber-desperate, sugar-skeptical consumers. You’ll find them in nearly every aisle: stuffed and dipped with the candy, blended into fuel near the protein bars, as alternative sweeteners alongside other baking ingredients and, of course, whole and unadulterated in the produce department.

To some, this influx may look like just another superfood getting its moment, destined to eventually go the way of the kale chip. Snack brands and retailers, however, are betting that the fruit’s best days are yet to come.

First cultivated in the Middle East and Northern Africa, dates have had a place in culinary culture for millennia, as the first bite to break a fast, as a way to welcome guests into one’s home, and as a foundational element of dishes like tagine and sticky toffee pudding. But motivating this latest surge in popularity is their nutritional profile, which aligns with dietary trends.

Consumers are shifting away from snacks with long lists of unfamiliar ingredients, opting instead for products made with whole foods they can count on one hand, Smith said. Dates, easy to manipulate and high in fiber, are a natural fit.

In the packaged goods space, fiber is quickly catching up with protein in terms of consumer interest, with dates emerging as a simple vehicle for the macronutrient. One serving of dates (about three pieces) contains about 5 grams of fiber, which is a helpful step toward the daily recommendation of 25 grams per day for women and 38 grams for men -- especially when the average American is consuming only 10 to 15 grams daily, according to Maya Feller, a dietitian nutritionist.

Still, she recommends managing your health-related expectations if you’re opting for one of the more altered date snacks on the market. “If it’s stuffed with peanut butter and covered in chocolate, enjoy it!” Feller said. “But don’t think it’s going to support gut health. Right? That’s a dessert.”

Dates’ natural sweetness has also made them an attractive substitute for sugar to snack companies and consumers. “They’re lower on the glycemic index than sugar,” said Vanessa Rissetto, a dietitian nutritionist, referring to a metric that ranks foods based on how quickly they raise a person’s blood sugar. “They taste decadent but have minimal impact on your blood sugar.”

This benefit inspired Sylvie Royston, then a practicing physician, to start Just Date. The company unveiled its first product, a date syrup, in 2018. “My mom always used dates to sweeten our Indian chutneys growing up,” she said. Just Date subsequently introduced a granulated date sugar and date-sweetened chocolate chips, and sells both to bakeries and granola companies.

Just Date is less than a decade old, but it’s the established veteran in the growing date-centric consumer packaged goods space. Newer brands, brought to market post-pandemic and angling for shelf space, are focusing on easy snacking and splashy flavors.

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In 2022, Michelle Valdez-Wilton, a former pastry chef, started Date Better, which sells gussied-up versions of the nut butter-stuffed, dark chocolate-dipped dates that have become ubiquitous across social media. Varieties include baklava and cashew lime crisp (with toasted quinoa for texture) -- bold flavor choices meant to stand out in a crowding market. “I have retailers reaching out to me saying, ‘Dates are really hot, and we’re looking for two date products to bring in,’” Valdez-Wilton said.

Datefix, created in 2023, sells Medjool dates blended with orange blossom water in squeezable pouches to fuel workouts. Alan Scholnick, the company’s founder, calls himself “a distance runner with a sweet tooth.” To him, Datefix is the real-food answer to function-forward running gels laden with fillers and stabilizers. The ingredients of Datefix “read like an Ottolenghi cookbook,” he said, referring to chef Yotam Ottolenghi.

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All of these new date snack brands need to get their fruit from somewhere. With sourcing under scrutiny from consumers and rising tariffs to consider, many companies are tapping the most prolific date-growing region in the United States. Farmers in the area, which stretches from the Coachella Valley in Southern California to the Arizona-Mexico border, say keeping up with demand is a struggle.

Bautista Family Organic Dates, a family-run farm in Mecca, California, has both a farmers market presence and a thriving online business -- but only until its harvest sells out, which happens quicker and quicker each year. “When we started, we only sold to local restaurants, but now we get orders from all over the U.S.,” said Alvaro Bautista, an owner. “It’s what we’ve been wishing for, but it’s a good-bad thing.”

“We are facing massive supply problems on the grower side,” said Joan Smith, who turned a handful of date palms into Rancho Meladuco Date Farm, her 10-acre business outside Palm Springs, California. Its sampler boxes of the fruit have a devoted following. “We can’t plant new trees fast enough, and as a result, we’re all out chasing the same fruit and trying to meet our respective customer demand.”

That the fibrous fruit became a bottleneck-causing snack craze is not surprising to those who work in nutrition. “In the U.S., we have a ‘some is good; more is better’ mentality,” said Feller, the dietitian. “This is what we do with any food that, in its naturally occurring form, can be beneficial. People want one thing to be an end-all, be-all.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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