Oasis Dates CEO and former Wonderful Company marketing executive Adam Cooper explains how he’s turning North America’s largest date grower into the category’s leading consumer brand with a multimillion-dollar campaign, in-store displays and retailer support.

Oasis Dates is the leading date brand that consumers have never heard of — at least not yet. But CEO Adam Cooper is investing in a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign to change that.

The date brand has been a company for “decades,” but as a grower and supplier of dates, not as a consumer brand. Cooper joined Oasis Dates in 2023 to begin its transformation into a vertically integrated brand in terms of owning and running the farms, owning and running the packing facility, and then ultimately selling and marketing the brand. The brand also did extensive consumer research on current and potential date customers to see what resonates.

This all culminated in its launch as the consumer brand Oasis Dates this October, with seven products in thousands of retail doors, including Kroger, Sam’s Club, Costco and Ahold Delhaize.

The brand is adding an exclamation point to this “bang” of a launch with a marketing campaign that will debut in November and run into 2027, Cooper said. His aim is for Oasis Dates to generate at least $100 million in its first year. Cooper is confident the brand has the capacity to drive hundreds of millions of dollars as it expands to even more retailers.

Previously, Cooper spent more than 11 years as a marketing executive at consumer packaged goods juggernaut The Wonderful Company. The multibillion-dollar privately held corporation owns Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Wonderful Halos mandarins and Pom Wonderful.

And now he’s fixed his gaze on dates. The category is “on fire,” he said, citing Circana data that the date category grew 27% in dollar sales year over year in 2025. Cooper shares more about Oasis Dates and the brand’s marketing strategy in the Q&A below.

Chief Marketer: What made you and the company say now is the time consumers want branded dates marketed to them?

Cooper: We were observing good tailwinds in the category in the last couple years. What we were observing on social media is, we were starting to see dietitians begin talking about the benefits of dates being a healthy sweet treat and all these great health benefits. We started seeing on TikTok and Instagram viral recipe use of dates, kind of like candy swaps of dates with Snickers or Reese’s or cookie dough. People started realizing that you can have both things. You can have the healthy and you can have a sweet treat.

That was enough that we saw household penetration, which we often look at as a demand proxy, increase. Household penetration of dates was growing from 6% of U.S. households buying dates five years ago to then 8% and then 10% a couple of years ago, and now we’re at above 12% of all U.S. households buying dates.

That doubling of that demand, although on the smaller scale, we saw that as an opportunity to accelerate in the future. It’s similar to what I experienced with Wonderful Pistachios when the category was relatively smaller. Then by investing in building the category, investing in the demand, investing in merchandising tools of retailers, we were able to double household penetration. And eventually we helped create Wonderful Pistachios, a billion-dollar brand.

I see a lot of those initial elements with the consumers, with the retailers that I saw with pistachios over a decade ago, and now even the retailers are seeing that this category is now big. It’s getting bigger and they’re realizing there’s a lot of opportunities because it’s great for produce.

Chief Marketer: How is it great for produce?

Cooper: It’s got no shrink, which is a big benefit in the produce department where a lot of stuff often goes bad and dates really don’t.

It’s got a great ring, so it adds to a basket. It makes the baskets of consumers much bigger. How much somebody is spending at the grocery store when dates are in the basket, it’s much higher than when it’s not. The date shopper is an attractive shopper, partly because the ring itself is higher. On shelf, it can be $6, $7, $8, depending on the item.

It’s a healthy growth story and it needs to be accelerated. This category didn’t have a brand being a leader, and so we’re stepping into that role and being a leader, and we think we can transform the category going forward.

Chief Marketer: What is your plan to be that leader and shake up the category?

Cooper: We launched this fall with a portfolio across all core Medjool products. We’re launching this innovation with the Functional Boost line, and that’s the Salted Caramel Energy and the Cinnamon Oat Gut Health. Retailers have been excited about that. We’re investing in merchandising tools in stores, so you’ll see major displays of Oasis Dates, and ultimately then it’s all coming up to our campaign that’s launching actually next week. And that’s a multimillion-dollar campaign that is grounded in insights and it’s grounded in our big unique selling proposition.

So Oasis Dates is “Earth’s Most Versatile Fruit,” and that campaign, that idea, that mantra, that is on every single one of our packages. It’s the core part of our advertising campaign that’s going to be launching. That campaign is built on three pillars: Oasis Dates is a healthy sweet treat, it’s a natural energy boost and it’s a culinary secret weapon.

Now we have creative across all three of those, and what we can do across all the different digital media platforms, we can tailor our creative depending on who we’re talking to or which platform that we’re on.

Those are the investments that we’re making. Go to the consumers directly, get them to bring in more consumers, because when we did our research, about 20% to 25% of all U.S. households had bought dates at some point, but there was another 35% that had not yet found dates, but were buying adjacent categories. They were buying other dried fruits, they were buying snack nuts, they were buying premium beverages, but they were not buying dates. We saw that as a huge opportunity, and we think the campaign, the product line, the innovation, the merchandising, all those things will help us lead this transformation of the category going forward.

Chief Marketer: How will consumers know where to find dates in the grocery store?

Cooper: Oasis Dates will be merchandised in the produce department, and that’s where people are looking for healthy snacks, of course. What we’re trying to do is drive the people to look for functional snacks and think of Oasis Dates as a functional snack.

The way that we’re doing that in produce to draw more attention to the category is to have dedicated merchandising. Our retail partners, like Kroger, for example, are going big with a major display program. We’ll have these displays that will be situated hopefully right in front of the produce department, and that’s most often where people start their shopping journey in the store.

Chief Marketer: And all of that distribution happened for this launch last month?

Cooper: Correct. That was mainly driven by the fact that we were launching the brand with our 2026 crop. The dates are harvested once a year. This year happened to start a little bit earlier than usual, but it was in August and September, and so that’s when we used the new fruit to then go sell the new brand.

We do have great retail partners. Pretty much all of the major retailers are partnering with us from Day 1, and many of them are taking our entire product line of seven items and some even taking multiple sizes of the same and all these shippers. The fact that we’re launching all of that at once is exciting and transformational. It was partly using my experience over eight years leading marketing for The Wonderful Company, all the campaigns and products that we launched with Wonderful Pistachios and Wonderful Halos and Pom Wonderful, and bringing that all into launching this new brand from Day 1 and with that strong retailer support has been awesome.

Chief Marketer: Do you think it’s your personal contacts that are doing it?

Cooper: We hired a full commercial team, and we have people who have worked in dates in the past. We’ve certainly been leveraging all those relationships, and that’s helped for sure.

But that’s been combined, though, with the program. We saw these retailers who were looking for growth and looking for a category that has been on the smaller side and just were heading toward that inflection point, and they realized that, OK, now there’s a leader, now we can invest in making this category bigger.

Chief Marketer: You’re not the only date brand out there, so how do you come in to retailers saying you are the category leader even if you are a new consumer brand? And then how are you going to stand out to consumers who maybe don’t know everything about dates?

Cooper: Before this, before the brand, we were North America’s largest date grower, the largest date packer. We had this scale, and those dates were being sold obviously in the market, and so we knew there was demand for our dates. We just needed to complete this third piece, but there hasn’t been anybody who has been actually driving demand in this category. Nobody has been investing money, the merchandising tools have been quite subdued, and it needed a leader in order to drive this.

Now, it does take time to build excitement with the retailers and convince them to switch over, first and foremost, and then secondly, to get consumers to be aware of the brand. That’s why we’re starting with a bang.

We have good promotions going on right now to help with the initial sell-in. We’ve got this big campaign that’s launching, so now that we’re in thousands of stores, now we’re launching a campaign in November, and that will lead all the way into the new year and through 2027.

Chief Marketer: When you said it takes time for the retailer to switch over, switch over from what?

Cooper: There are other brands, like you mentioned, so switching over from other date brands that are already in store.

Chief Marketer: They’re not making the date shelf bigger?

Cooper: For the most part, they are swapping Oasis Dates in for whatever the current date brand is, because they also know that we’ll be able to make it bigger because they’ve seen the innovation that we’ve already brought, and they know we have a pipeline of innovation coming.

I saw the same thing with Wonderful Pistachios. The category, when there’s a leader that is vertically integrated, that controls all the quality, that’s driving demand, driving innovation, driving in-store merchandising, the category grows much faster by going all in with that leader. When you keep it fragmented, that’s when growth can sputter and be inconsistent because you’re simply not getting the support.

For example, our multimillion-dollar advertising campaign is geotargeted only around the stores where we have Oasis Dates. So our retailers that are putting us in store, they’ll get the benefit. Retailers that are not putting in Oasis Dates will not get that benefit.

Chief Marketer: Can we talk a little bit more about the facets of the campaign?

Cooper: The campaign will be launching across multiple social media platforms from Instagram and Facebook to TikTok to Pinterest and YouTube. We will geotarget around where retailers merchandise our product. We’ve also launched a creator program that we call Earth’s Most Versatile Creators. So as an extension of our campaign being Earth’s Most Versatile Fruit, we want to work with multi-hyphenate people and those people who are great at multiple things, not just one thing.

Then when you look at our campaign creative itself, it’s very bold, it’s very colorful, it’s very bright, and it’s hopefully inspiring for consumers to figure out how Oasis Dates can fit into their everyday life.

Over time, the other thing that we’re going to be building out is a program with registered dietitians, and so that group can really get the word out about all the great health benefits also of Oasis Dates.

Chief Marketer: What do you expect your first year to be in sales?

Cooper: We think that we can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars as a brand and of retail sales. We have big aspirations to make this a big brand. As North America’s largest grower of Medjool dates, we have to drive demand. We expect to keep growing, and we expect to keep growing distribution. Even though we’re in major retailers, we still have lots of opportunities to get in additional doors and divisions and even retailers.

Chief Marketer: Hundreds of millions as a brand, in year one, you think?

Cooper: In retail sales, I think we could easily be well over $100 million.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.