Beyond the supermarket shelf: How Tai Sun is cracking open a new chapter at 60

For six decades, Tai Sun has been a familiar sight on supermarket shelves in Singapore. Now, as it marks its 60th anniversary, the homegrown snack brand is looking beyond the aisle to find new ways for consumers, particularly younger ones, to experience its heritage.

From turning its nuts into ice cream and artisanal chocolate to showing up in immersive experiences and football-inspired activations, Tai Sun has been experimenting with collaborations, product innovation and experiences that put its familiar products into less familiar settings.

Speaking to MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Esther Loo, third-generation head of marketing and business development at Tai Sun, said the shift reflects how the way younger consumers discover and engage with brands has evolved.

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"Our heritage is something we want to preserve rather than move away from," said Loo. "For 60 years, generations of Singaporeans have grown up with the familiar crunch and flavours of Tai Sun, and that trust remains very important to us."

Rather than reinventing the brand entirely, Tai Sun is looking to refresh how consumers encounter it while keeping its established products, flavours and quality at the centre.

Its latest attempt to do so sees the snack brand enter the world of artisanal chocolate through a collaboration with homegrown chocolatier Mr. Bucket Chocolaterie. The collaboration features two limited-edition creations. "Peanut sesame mochi" combines Tai Sun peanut crackers with mini mochi, sesame and dark chocolate, while "Cashew coffee crunch" pairs its roasted cashews with coffee and milk chocolate.

Tai Sun chose Mr. Bucket as part of a wider effort to work with homegrown brands that share its focus on quality and local creativity. According to Loo, the chocolatier's emphasis on handcrafted, bean-to-bar chocolate and experimentation with unexpected flavours complemented Tai Sun's own heritage in nuts and snacks.

"Nuts and chocolate are already a familiar pairing, so the opportunity was to take something consumers already know and give it a fresh, more playful interpretation through new flavours and textures," she said.

For Loo, the approach taps into the idea that familiarity and novelty do not necessarily have to compete.

"It is less about changing what consumers already love, and more about creating another reason for them to rediscover it," she added.

That same thinking underpinned an earlier collaboration with homegrown ice cream brand Creamier, which reimagined Tai Sun's nuts as limited-edition ice cream flavours.

Together, the Creamier and Mr. Bucket partnerships have allowed Tai Sun to take products consumers already recognise and place them into different formats and consumption occasions. They also form part of a broader anniversary strategy built around product innovation, collaborations and experiences rather than simply looking back at the brand's six-decade history.

According to Loo, collaborations give Tai Sun an opportunity to enter spaces where consumers may not traditionally expect to encounter it, while tapping into the creative strengths and audiences of its partners.

"Rather than only engaging consumers through the supermarket aisle, we have been exploring ways to make Tai Sun more experiential and relevant to different lifestyles," she said.

However, Tai Sun's efforts to modernise have not been limited to collaborations. The brand has also refreshed how it looks in the very aisle it is trying to move beyond. Last year, Tai Sun introduced new packaging with brighter, more vibrant pops of colour, giving the heritage brand a fresher and more contemporary presence on shelves.

The visual refresh reflects the same balancing act behind its collaborations: preserving the familiarity built over decades while updating how the brand presents itself to consumers today.

For younger consumers in particular, Loo said staying relevant does not mean Tai Sun needs to become a completely different brand. Instead, it is about creating opportunities for them to discover the brand and build associations with it on their own terms. She added: 

For us, staying relevant is not about becoming a completely different brand, but finding new ways for younger consumers to discover, experience and form their own memories with Tai Sun, while remaining rooted in the heritage that has carried us for six decades.

That approach has also seen Tai Sun find new occasions to fit into consumers' everyday lives. In July, the brand took its 60th anniversary celebrations into football culture with a campaign created alongside Fishermen Integrated Singapore.

At the centre of the campaign was the "Tai Sun nutty footbowl", a specially designed snack bowl for fans watching football on their mobile devices. It was built around the insight that football viewing has moved beyond the traditional living room television, with fans catching matches during commutes, study breaks, late-night mamak sessions and other moments throughout the day.

Tai Sun has similarly taken the brand beyond products and packaging into physical experiences. Its partnership with the Museum of Ice Cream gave consumers a more playful and immersive way to interact with Tai Sun outside the traditional supermarket environment.

For Loo, initiatives spanning its packaging refresh, experiential activations and partnerships with brands such as Creamier and Mr. Bucket are ultimately intended to help consumers see the heritage brand differently.

"We want consumers to see that a 60-year-old heritage brand can still be playful, creative and relevant, while remaining true to the quality and familiar flavours that have defined Tai Sun across generations," she said.

Looking beyond its anniversary year, Tai Sun plans to continue exploring new flavours and products, complementary collaborations and consumer activations that give people ways to engage with the brand beyond simply purchasing a snack.

Together, the moves point to Tai Sun's broader ambition at 60: keeping the familiarity that has sustained the brand for six decades, while finding new places, formats and experiences for the next generation to discover it.

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