CHICAGO — As the Mondelez International-owned cookie brand Chips Ahoy! continues to expand its reach in the snack market, the brand’s senior director Sabrina Sierant believes honing in on innovation and consumer insights will keep Chips Ahoy! at the forefront of this competitive space for the foreseeable future.

In an April interview with Milling & Baking News, Sierant described the evolution of Chips Ahoy! under her leadership and where she aims to take the brand from here on out.

Long before accepting the director role at Chips Ahoy!, Sierant built a strong connection to the iconic cookie brand. She joined Mondelez in May 2013as associate brand manager for Chips Ahoy! In this role, Sierant managed forecasting and business analytics for expanding the brand portfolio, led a cross-functional team in developing new products and packaging for 2015 innovation, and worked with licensing and foodservice teams to deliver inbound and outbound opportunities for the brand.

Sierant would later work with other Mondelez brands such as Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish before returning to Chips Ahoy! in a much more substantial leadership role in 2019. Sierant said she believes her leadership strategies have helped revitalize Chips Ahoy! for today’s consumer and grow it into the No. 1 chocolate chip cookie brand with a 50% share of that market.

“So from like 2017 to 2019, the US business (Mondelez) wasn’t really investing in Chips Ahoy!, and so we didn’t have any real media support and business was flat to down for those few years,” Sierant said. “And at the end of 2019, we made a decision to reinvest back in the brand. It is over a 60-year-old brand that consumers love, but we hadn’t talked to them in a bit, so you know I would say for the first few years after we decided to reinvest in it, it was all about some of the basics. What is our brand all about? Building the brand foundations and a creative campaign that brought back a modernized version of our mascot Chip and actually spending (on) media and talking to consumers and building back that emotional connection, and we also decided to step up our partnership with Hershey and launch new flavor innovations and (we) also renovated our core blue bag. So getting some of the basics right in the first few years … helped (drive) growth during COVID and beyond.”

Sierant elaborated on how the knowledge and experience she gained from working with other brands at Mondelez made her think about the direction she wants to take Chips Ahoy!, specifically how to expand the brand to other retail channels such as convenience and dollar stores.

“My confections experience specifically helped to open my eyes to the other channels…,” Sierant said. “Chips Ahoy! and our biscuit business is pretty much driven by food and mass. That’s (where) the majority of our portfolio is, but when you go to our confection side of the business, like Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish, a lot of those products and packs are immediate consumption and you have other channels that are important as well, like convenience as well as other drug, club, dollar. It helped to give me perspective. So, for Chips Ahoy! this time around, thinking holistically, how do I help the business grow across more occasions and more channels?”

Moving onto recent product innovations, Mondelez launched its first ever gluten-free cookies under the Chips Ahoy! brand in May 2024. Sierant explained how improving upon the taste of other gluten-free cookies factored into the creation of this new product.

“We saw over 20% of households are purchasing gluten-free cookies and crackers,” Sierant said. “And what we also saw when we talked to consumers is taste is critical, and they weren’t getting the taste that they needed from a mainstream chocolate chip cookie. So we had an opportunity and our sister brand, Oreo, had always had already seen success.…Oreo had already launched gluten free, so we kind of followed suit.”

Four months later, Mondelez debuted Chips Ahoy! Big Chewy Cookies, which are three times larger than the average Chips Ahoy! cookies yet still convenient for on-the-go snacking. Sierant said she and her team looked at consumer feedback when determining how to capture the right balance between size and convenience for the cookie.

“Within the convenience channel that also over indexes in on-the-go snacking, what we saw from talking to our consumers is there was this need for something more indulgent, more satiating and something not as messy,” Sierant said. “They wanted something bigger, so we launched our big chewy to fill and meet that need. And of course we showed them multiple different sizes. We ended up getting to the size that we landed on, which is three times bigger, after a ton of iteration with consumers to identify what was the right size for them for that on-the-go occasion.”

More recently, in January 2025 Mondelez launched Chips Ahoy! Baked Bites, chocolate chip cookies reimagined as soft-baked treats. Sierant said Chips Ahoy!’s status as a top-selling chocolate chip cookie brand proved advantageous when it finally entered the prepackaged desserts category.

“We looked at what are some of the other sweet snacking adjacencies that we have a right to play in,” Sierant said. “And packaged cakes and pastries, that category is about $10 billion from our research. And we saw that chocolate chip is actually a walking attribute, so consumers are looking for that flavor profile and we are the lead chocolate chip cookie. And we also saw there’s actually 75% of shoppers purchase both cookies and prepackaged cakes and pastries like brownies or mini muffins, so we definitely saw an opportunity there for us.”

In October, Mondelez will debut Chips Ahoy! Fresh Stacks, which fit five original Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies into a single stack sleeve (five per box). Sierant said she and her team took several factors into account when developing the product, including a lower price point.

“We had seen that a big portion of over half of biscuit sales are sold from pack types that are under $4,” Sierant said. “What we wanted to do is offer something for those consumers that are looking for a lower absolute price point and for their pantry packs, and so fresh stacks was launched at a price point under $3 for the suggested SRP. But we wanted to do something a little bit more than just offer a lower price point. (Consumers) want freshness, they want portability, and so that’s where we maybe took a little bit of inspiration from the cracker side that has fresh decks on Ritz and use that as we were thinking about what could we design for consumers that would add value beyond just a lower absolute price point?”

In terms of sales and brand growth, Sierant said new product innovations, coupled with millennial and Gen Z-focused marketing strategies, boosted the momentum of Chips Ahoy! as it added 2.05 million new households between 2024 and 2025.

“The innovation is a piece of what’s driving some households to come back in,” Sierant said. “I think also we are supporting our innovation with relevant activation as well. So for example, with our Big Cookie launch, we didn’t just launch a new product and not support it, we decided to partner with hip-hop artist Big Sean and go where consumers are, and we did a merch collab with him and launched it at Complex Con in Las Vegas where Gen Z and millennials are and sampled the product and consumers got to meet Big Sean. So driving buzz and news around Chips Ahoy! to help drive modernity and salience is also very important to continue to keep people coming back to the brand and have the brand stay relevant.”

With household penetration for Chips Ahoy! up by 7.5% in the last 26 weeks since March 27, Sierant said focusing on innovation and evolving products lines such as Baked Bites and Fresh Stacks remain top priorities for the brand.

“Innovation will continue to be a part of our plan,” Sierant said. “I think we’ve seen success with it, and we want to keep up with consumer trends. With Big Chewy Cookie, we launched three flavors. We will continue to support it, drive awareness of it, and see what other opportunity there is with innovation to build upon it. The same for Baked Bites. What I would say is we just launched it but through our testing, we see runway on this and so we will also continue to support it, grow it and then think about ‘What are the right pack types or flavors to build out this platform?’ as well, and the same goes for gluten-free and Fresh Stacks.”