Cartoon Candy has bought the manufacturing assets of liquidated chocolate maker Beyers, giving the sweets and snacks maker its first foothold in chocolate — and a possible route to Woolworths, the Beyers customer whose loss the chocolate maker founder blames for its collapse.
Beyers supplied Woolworths for more than 30 years, and the retailer accounted for about R320m of its roughly R650m annual turnover before the relationship ended in January 2025. Now Cartoon Candy, a privately owned confectionery manufacturer, wants Woolworths on its customer list.
“We’d been looking at how to expand our business into chocolate over the past few years and the Beyers opportunity arose,” Cartoon Candy MD Gary Ttappous tells the FM. “If we can resuscitate or recreate a relationship with Woolworths … we can produce great-quality products at great value.”
The deal with Beyers, concluded just over a month ago, is not an acquisition. Cartoon Candy did not buy the company as a going concern; it bought a collection of assets out of liquidation, mostly manufacturing equipment capable of producing a niche range of confectionery. That gives it something it has lacked in the years it has been circling the category: the capacity to make chocolate.
“We didn’t buy the business. We bought a whole host of assets,” Ttappous says.
Whether the Beyers name survives is undecided. “That does have some value in the world,” he says.
Beyers went into liquidation in late April after several difficult years in what has become one of the country’s most public supplier-retailer disputes.
It all falls apart
Its relationship with Woolworths began to unravel in 2023, when the retailer accused Beyers of breaching an exclusivity agreement by supplying “materially similar” products to competitors, including Checkers and Pick n Pay. Beyers says it used a separate factory, staff and recipes for those clients and never used Woolworths’ intellectual property.
Beyers made much of Woolworths’ private-label chocolate, including variations of the retailer’s Chuckles range, as well as its own Sweetie Pie. Chuckles belongs to Woolworths and is not part of the Cartoon Candy deal.
Founder Kees Beyers has argued that losing the Woolworths contract was the decisive blow. Woolworths disputes this, saying Beyers breached the exclusivity agreement and that its failure stemmed from multiple factors.
Court papers filed by Absa, which was owed R235m when Beyers collapsed, point to a combination of shocks: the loss of the Woolworths contract, steep cocoa price inflation, debt taken on to expand production and acquire another factory, and a recall of products supplied to Checkers shortly before the collapse.
Founded in 1999 and based in Elandsfontein, east of Joburg, Cartoon Candy makes sweets and snacks under its own brands and for retailers, wholesalers, restaurant groups and airlines. Its customers include Spur, Ocean Basket, Shoprite, Pep, Dis-Chem, Pick n Pay and Clicks. Woolworths is the conspicuous gap.
Beyond confectionery, it makes maize snacks – Twiggles, Mexicanos and Puffy Sweet Korn among them — using its own maize mill, as well as vitamin and functional gummies for retailers and wellness brands. Ttappous says its fastest-growing division is jellies, where it has added capacity to meet demand from nutraceutical brands moving into gummy formats. He bought Cartoon Candy 12 years ago and describes it as a family business with no private equity or institutional ownership.
Ttappous says cash-strapped consumers aren’t abandoning treats; they are buying smaller packs and looking harder for value, which is helping the private label. Ttappous sees no contradiction with the wellness trend: people still want indulgence, they’re just more price-conscious about how they get it.
For now, the priority is getting the former Beyers equipment back into production. Longer term, Ttappous expects chocolate to become a meaningful growth business, though he stops short of calling it Cartoon Candy’s single biggest opportunity.
Whether Woolworths comes back for its chocolate is what might determine how big that business gets.
