A couple of weeks ago, Tyson announced that they were discontinuing their blended patty line and taking out the egg in their plant-based chicken nuggets.
A couple of people messaged me and I saw some posts saying that “blending plants and meat is dead” and it reminded me when people were saying that “plant-based meat” was dead when they took pictures of the meat isle back in March. Of course, this was proven wrong as meat companies got wrecked by COVID and plant-based products boomed the rest of the year. Though it mainly shows the gut reaction of people with biases to brag about themselves being right, most people don’t want to either do the research or be insightful about the bigger picture.
When one tries something new, there is a higher chance of failure than trying something old. Not only that, but sometimes, we just can’t control the factors that might cause things to fail. The pandemic is kind of this ultimate change agent in this regard. We could not control when things failed, so is it right to criticize if something fails because we think we know the sole reason why it did? When you think of all of the restaurants capsized, premium brands slumping, and extremely high unemployment rates, the answer is no, there are a lot of factors and there are a lot of success stories and many more failure stories.
As a disclaimer, I am biased on blending animal flesh and plant stuff mainly because the startup Better Meat Co, which I have had a decent involvement in, and of course, have some options in the company. The company has its whole premise on making blended products, though specifically, they target selling the concept to big companies who want to innovate in the plant-based space. We didn’t make the Tyson blended burger that got discontinued, but we collaborated with Perdue Farms to make the awesome Chicken Plus product which has grown Perdue’s chicken nugget brand.
Me-too Loses
Trends move fast and without proper love and care, you can trip and fall flat on your face.
Tyson’s burger was inferior in a taste perspective. I bought it, it’s TVP mashed with beef and some flavors. The pea based TVP absorbs a lot of the delicious beef notes and you end up with a bland burger. Not only that, but they had limited retail shelf space, only seeing about 3 of them in a sea of beef burgers. I’m not a retail expert but they didn’t really go all in on the retail piece, or perhaps they expected the hype to carry the product. Tyson’s branding was also super confusing and focused a lot on the health, but not on the taste. The call out specifically only actually mentions nutritionals, but not taste and as we all know, taste is king.
However, I thought their chicken nuggets were really well made. A bit pricy, but apparently, it paid off.
Me-Too products are generally rushed innovations to just capture market share. Without a unique value proposition, you are asking your R+D team to create what took years, in months. Failed me-too’s like Quaker’s oatmilk and Safeway’s clean-label plant burger are generally suffering in taste more than anything and you can sort of tell that it was made to capture marketshare of a product.
Just like the spectacular flop that was Quibi, the forensics of failure in that specific company was multifolded but many people will blame it on one thing. Katzenberg, an old dude who has a lot of street cred, blames the pandemic. News articles blame leadership, others blame the fact that they didn’t have enough capital or the marketing was just not right. There are many reasons why products fail and we never know what goes on internally so of course, people speculate.
There is no real formula for success in a product, but a lot of it correlates to speed and care. Generally, the more time a product has to incubate, the more successful it becomes. Startups that launch small have an inherent advantage because they don’t pay PR firms to talk about their invention, they earned it. Caring is a different, more complex beast but it’s being on board, aware, and excited about the thing you launch.
0.5 mm
I cried watching a Japanese movie on an airplane called 0.5mm. In general, airplane movies make me cry. It’s not game changing, but a comfortable slice of life. One of the quotes in the movie (and I’m paraphrasing) is about moving a mountain. We might think that we ourselves cannot move a mountain, but if everyone in the world does one single push, we could probably move it 0.5mm but that’s if everyone moves it at once.
Just like any product launch, the most successful launches and the steepest velocity is when the whole company puts all its energy pushing to make a product successful. When this happens, you generally see things pay off.
How do you do that? You need to have people taste and see the product, and believe in it. I’ve seen many instances where timelines go through warp speed when people believe in the product that is just so good, it skips timelines and overrides decisions. What Tyson produced probably was just something they had to get out the door and say “we did something like them but better”. This is probably the same situation with Lightlife’s new burger. With food, you have to taste to believe and the best part about the job is that when it tastes and looks phenomenal, then magic starts to happen.
Big companies have the ability to get everyone on board, but to be honest, it takes a special team of talent to send shockwaves through the system. I’ve done it at the corporate giant in Isagenix with a small squad of R+D talent and at Better Meat Co, when it was a 3 person team. It’s a very interesting situation. Being the innovator that creates shockwaves enough to change the tide is much better than one person pushing against the tide.
This is partially why Perdue’s chicken nuggets are doing pretty well. Though there are many factors, most of the jolt of innovation, and the ability to get everyone on board came from a small team convincing their top brass that this was a good idea. That team put their heart and soul in this idea that plants and meat combined can make a good product and made application products with care.
Wide Open for Innovation
Blended Products are a wide open space with plenty of failures and not much publicized success.
In my opinion, there is a huge gold mine of potential for a young, crazy team of entrepreneurs to make blended products to be sold in supermarkets. There has to be a calibration of understanding who you serve, and the product you make, but the space is wide open for exploration.
One example I found recently at my local grocery store is a brand called Wahlburgers (basically, Mark Wahlburg and his brothers made a burger chain and now has to sell at retail who make frozen burgers. They had a turkey burger that was blended. Blended with what? Stuffing! They call out that their turkey burger is like eating a stuffed turkey. No call outs on health, or anything like that, the call out was for a flavor experience unlike anything before.
The trade-off for being a large company is that not only do you have to get everyone on board, but a failure becomes public. The smaller you are, the less people care and therefore, you have the time to nurture and care about the things you create. Surprisingly, consumers can discern something that is created with care and love. It sounds corny, but I’ve seen it time and time and again. So be patient, really make your product taste good and go and put it out into the universe. If it fails, try again. You only need one public success.
PS: It’s been a while since I wrote. Why? I’ve been getting into writing fictional game mechanics for Table Top Role Playing Games with a couple of friends. Some coals in the fire for new media projects, but I’ll be trying my hand at fiction in 2021
