Bazooka Candy’s CEO on the brand’s sweet athlete investment deal
Bazooka Candy’s CEO on the brand’s sweet athlete investment deal
It may seem like an odd combination: superstar athletes and chewing gum. But the candy brand Bazooka — maker of Ring Pops, Push Pops and, of course, Bazooka Bubble Gum — recently got an injection of investment money from major athletes.
Sixty or so baseball, basketball and football players are part of the investor group, which includes Seattle Seahawks wide receiver DK Metcalf and Deja Kelly of the University of North Carolina.
Tony Jacobs, CEO of Bazooka Candy Brands, spoke with Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour about how the candy maker is planning to leverage the new relationships. The following is an edited transcript of their conversations.
Sabri Ben-Achour: Normally, we hear about brands sponsoring athletes, and here we’ve got all these athletes putting money into Bazooka Candy. Why is that?
Tony Jacobs: Well, look, it’s a great story, and I’m going to give you a little bit of a background on Bazooka to kind of make the connection for you. So I’ve been with the company for about 11 years, and we have really had a great run. Now, that growth attracted some attention to our business, and we were bought by Apax Partners back in October of 2023, and they bring an incredible network to the table. And that network included the Patricof Co, who is made up of athlete investors. And I could not have been more excited to have all these athletes invested in the company, which they subsequently did.
Ben-Achour: Yeah, why does Bazooka see the sports world as a good place to forge relationships and kind of expand into right now?
Jacobs: When you talk about sports and athletes, whether it’s adults, kids, they are all watching sports, playing sports, playing video games about sports and interested in them. So it’s a great way to connect with our consumer base. And in a world today, also, you know that is so much more socially, digitally focused, it’s incredibly powerful what these athletes can bring to the table by motivating their network and connecting to ours. What was exciting to me about the Patricof deal was it wasn’t just a sponsorship too. It wasn’t just, hey, we’ll have an athlete come in and do a tweet or do something on their social media page. It was a chance to help build the business, matching who they were, matching who we were and what we’re trying to do, and do it over the long term. And that was the most exciting thing to me.
Ben-Achour: Does that mean we’re going to see a lot of athletes show up in commercials or in those comics that come with the bubble gum? Or how’s that going to work?
Jacobs: Yeah, that’s exactly what you’re going to see. We are going to be getting these athlete investors directly involved in the business. And, you know, we’ve kicked it off with DK Metcalf, who is one of our investors. It was really exciting. He came here to the office, and I thought, “Hey, DK Metcalf’s coming in. It’s going to be a meet-and-greet. We’ll shake hands, we’ll take a photo in front of the Bazooka sign.” But it was a lot more than that. DK came in, and what I heard was, “Oh, he wants to present a PowerPoint presentation.” And I had to say, I was surprised. I’ve never had any celebrity come in and present a PowerPoint to me, and he came in and presented a presentation around who he was, his brand equity, product ideas, PR ideas and content ideas that were really good. And we’re currently working on those with DK to figure out how we bring those to market.
Ben-Achour: Bazooka is also partnered with DC Comics, and I am wondering if that means we will see either Batman and Wonder Woman in those gum comics, or if we’re gonna see Bazooka gum in some Batman and Wonder Woman comics coming out.
Jacobs: We have created what we call the Bazookaverse. We have these incredible comics with Bazooka Joe that’s been around since, you know, 1951, but it’s a great way to connect, you know, have nostalgia, but make it new by bringing in culturally relevant characters and people into the comics. And you saw that, just like you said, with DC Comics. And then what you’re going to see in the future, we are working currently with our celebrity athletes and how we bring them into the Bazookaverse, as well. And it was actually one of DK Metcalf’s idea of how we could bring him and other sports celebrities into the comics and do some fun things around it.
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