1 million followers: Hitschies' recipe for viral candy

In this update episode, Karo talks to Philip Hitschler-Becker, CEO of Hitschies. Live at data:unplugged, the two look at the rapid transformation of the almost 100-year-old family business into a viral social media brand.

How does Hitschies hold its own as the “smallest but loudest” player on the candy shelf against industry giants such as Haribo or Katjes? What is the strategy behind new product innovations that trigger viral cravings in supermarkets? And how do you build a loyal community with over a million followers on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn and place it at the center of product development?

Philip also shares his perspective on the challenges of D2C e-commerce with low-priced items, international expansion into 46 countries and why Hitschies is currently investing heavily in building its own AI team for automation and efficiency gains.

An overview of the conversation

1. 1:54 Challenges in e-commerce
2. 5:11 New products and innovations
3. 7:19 The importance of community
4. 9:45 TikTok and social media success
5. 12:09 The importance of AI in business
6. 21:25 The vision of the digital candy brand

From community hype to scalable AI strategy

Philip emphasizes that companies that do not implement artificial intelligence meaningfully and in good time will have a significant competitive disadvantage in five years. To that end, Hitschies is currently collecting data intensively and relying on dedicated employees to advance the vision of the global, digital candy brand. These technological and strategic challenges are exactly where we come in as a digital consultancy. Promising ideas often fail because of legacy system landscapes or isolated data silos. As part of our AI consulting, we support brands and retailers in turning technological potential into measurable business impact.

We support digital transformation end-to-end, from a clear roadmap and well-founded data readiness assessments to comprehensive AI implementation. Whether it is about modernizing the digital infrastructure, carrying out a CDP implementation to make better use of valuable community data or creating tailor-made solutions for process automation with AI, we ensure that tech stack optimization in e-commerce is precisely aligned with value creation. In this way, a technological trend becomes a scalable, economic lever for the business model.