BIG FISH; PEPPERIDGE FARM SCALING MARKET WITH GOLDEN SNACK CRACKER.

Byline: Bob Fernandez Knight Ridder Newspapers

Doris Ann Seymour spots a scrawny Goldfish cracker like a hawk, which is not surprising. In a 12-hour shift, about 13 million of the just-baked tiny orange crackers float past her workstation in neat rows on a conveyor belt.

That's more than a million fistfuls, if you're measuring in cocktail party mouthfuls.

``After you've been on the line for a while, you have an eye for it,'' says Seymour, an oven tender. She was putting 20 Goldfish crackers upside down in a device that measured their thickness. Their combined width was supposed to be 140 millimeters. Today, though, it was more like 130.

That means their plumpness - ``puff,'' as it's called by Goldfish manufacturer Pepperidge Farm - wasn't up to par, pointing to some minor problems in the baking.

``If they get too much moisture, they get stale,'' Seymour said, wrinkling her nose. ``You ever eat a stale potato chip? Goldfish can get like that.''

In the Pepperidge Farm baking factory in Denver, Pa., making those fun little Goldfish crackers is serious business, so serious, in fact, that the company calculates precisely how many chews it should take to eat the little suckers.

And for good reason. Goldfish, despite their tiny size and playful marketing pitches, have become something of a major breadwinner for Pepperidge Farm, the baking division of Campbell Soup Co. They also have given Pepperidge Farm a leg up in the snack-cracker war.

Figures from the cracker number-crunchers show Goldfish is now the second-largest snack cracker in dollar sales, nibbling away at the nation's largest snack cracker, Ritz, and about even with the Cheez-It brand. And it's not an industry of crumbs. Americans buy about $2 billion worth of crackers a year, according to Information Resources Inc., a Chicago company that tracks purchases at the checkout line. It was in the past year that Goldfish edged past Cheez-It crackers into the second spot.

Pepperidge Farm says growth of Goldfish sales is well above the average in the cracker market, increasing about 24 percent a year. In the past year, it did even better, up 28 percent.

In recent years, Goldfish have emerged as Pepperidge Farm's biggest brand - bigger than Milano cookies - and their profit margins are solid, company officials say. Campbell has been emphasizing high-profit products as it restructures, and Goldfish is among those it says have a future with the company.

The company has substantially increased advertising of Goldfish, added flavors (including its Flavor Blasted line for radical teen-agers) and even came out with a special-edition Goldfish, the Smiley. As the name suggests, these are Goldfish with smiles on their faces.

All of this hasn't gone unnoticed by the competition.

Keebler, which makes the Cheez-It cracker, has been a tough competitor and is expanding its own brand. Nabisco, maker of the nation's most popular cracker, Ritz, sniffs that the growth in Goldfish is not worrisome, but it is moving to increase advertising of its major cookie and cracker brands, including Ritz.

``We are, by far, the leader,'' said Nabisco spokeswoman Ann Smith. ``We don't see Goldfish as a threat.''

CAPTION(S):

Photo, Chart

PHOTO (Color) no caption (Goldfish crackers)

CHART: CRUNCHING NUMBERS

Goldfish has become Pepperidge Farm's biggest brand, with sales growing an average of 24% a year. 1997-98 sales of the leading snack crackers:

SOURCE: Information Resources Inc.

Knight-Ridder Tribune