Abstract
TERRA CHIPS, a USA-based company, founded in 1990, offers a wide range of vegetable and potato chips, which have created a new niche on the salty snack market. Terra has always had a tradition of creating masterful combination's of unique vegetables with a variety of fabulous flavors. So we are going to deal with this business case, in order to make you more familiar with this company. First, to define the framework in which the company is evolving, a SWOT analysis has to be carried out. Indeed, that will helps us find the internal variables of the company (its strengths and weaknesses), that is to say those under the control of the firm and the external variables (opportunities and threats) that the company has to face. The snack market as a whole is growing at some 5% a year. Certain sectors, such as meat snacks, yogurt and sugar – free candy, are experiencing much faster growth, while many of the most established product sector are seeing much more modest growth. There is an evolution concerning snacks: before they used to be only salty snacks, but today we can notice that specialty snacks, bakery snacks or sweet snacks appear. The healthy trend is certainly not the only trend in packaged snack foods, but it is by far the most important and widespread one, driven in large part by a heavy national focus on children's health. Although sales of packaged snack foods in the U.S. topped $61 billion in 2005, this is up only 6% over 2001 sales, since good returns from "healthy" categories like yogurt and fresh fruit have been mostly offset by losses in "less healthy" categories like candy and cookies.
