Kind Snacks is venturing outside of nutrition bars for the first time ever — and it should terrify Welch's

With an emphasis on wholesome ingredients, a do-gooder social agenda and smart marketing, Kind's granola snack bars have been a game-changer in the US snack bar market.

The healthy snack-maker is venturing — which it says are all-natural fruit snacks for kids devoid of added sugars, genetically engineered ingredients and preservatives.

Sweet snacks have garnered a bad rap in recent years, with several studies linking many of them tohaving grown by just 1.7% in retail value terms over 2015.

Kind sees a clear opportunity in entering the market and catering to the demand for products that appear more natural, with a mission to revive the $963 million category.

"Since our inception, we have lived by the 'Kind Promise,' where the first ingredient in all our products is always something nutritionally rich, something you have heard of and something you can pronounce," Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of Kind, told Business Insider. "We felt that the fruit snacks category was ripe for disruption. There is a lot of deception in the space."

Nine out of the 10 leading fruit snacks have added sugar as their first ingredient and the same first two ingredients as gummy bears corn syrup and sugar, according to IRI. The brand is tackling this "deception" head-on in the marketing promotions around its new category, calling competitors out without directly naming them.

The video below, for instance, features a series of kids attempting to read

KIND Fruit Bites: New Fruit Snack for Kids | No Added Sugar

In another video, the brand has stitched together several home-recording style videos that show kids not being kind, such as smashing vases and pushing another kid over. It ends with the tagline "Kids aren't always kind but their snacks should be."

But perhaps the biggest investment is an experiential stunt that it is doing in New York, another first for the brand. Sugar is the enemy and is front and center of a three-story high educational display made up ofin Times Square today.

The structure visually represents all the he installation also showcases statues of children each made from 64 pounds of sugar – the average amount of sugar one 8-year old child consumes in a year, according to the IRI.

"We have always been focused on bringing transparency to the industry and categories that we’ve been playing in," said The stunt in Times Square is just a new way in which to do this."