Back to episode — Episode 2440 CWSA 04/10/24
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e jeans sort of they work in every situation except formal. You know, like they're easy to wash and take care of and they don't cost too much and they feel good, they make you look — they basically do everything. So I thought, well, maybe I can make a food that does that, just sort of does everything. Now the company didn't work out for other reasons, partly because the formula in the burrito mad…
← Previous segment →have vitamins and minerals in anywhere near the minimum requirement that you need. So we had to supplement. There was no way around it. But it didn't work as a supplement. It just made it too hard anyway.
So part of that story is we sold into 7-Eleven. Imagine being a startup company that gets a contract with 7-Eleven. Now it's a contract to test it. So they would say we're going to test it in these stores and at the end of the test we'll decide whether it's a permanent product. So you just had to do well and sell during the test.
Do you know how many units we sold during the test? Take a guess. How many total units? Just a guess. How many? The answer is zero. Zero sales. Do you know why? It wasn't because people looked at the product and decided not to buy it. It was because every store that we checked, the product was covered up by another product. And it was always the same product: Kraft Lunchables. Kraft Lunchables were actually placed in front of my product in all the stores we checked.
Did you know that that's a common trick? Because somebody like Kraft would have people who are boots on the ground, so they actually visit the stores. I didn't have boots on the ground because we were a startup. So it's just when we checked we found that their boots on the ground did this thing. Because you don't want to be selling Lunchables, which anybody can look at and say, I'm not so sure that's the healthiest thing I could give my kid. You can't have that sitting right on the shelf next to something that just has all the vitamins and minerals that your kid needs, right? They can't be next to each other. So they just move theirs in front of it in all the stores we checked. Everyone. You sold nothing and the test failed and I went out of business.
By the way, same thing happened in some other places. We sold it to Costco and Safeway, made all the sales. It's just none of the tests worked. And the tests didn't work in other places because they never tested it in Costco. We signed up to do a test in a number of stores, shipped them the product. Product sat in the back warehouse the whole time and then the test was over and they said we sold none because it never made it in the store. So if we had boots on the ground we could have sent like
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an army of people to say, hey, have you moved that onto the shelf yet? Can we help you move it to the shelf? And that probably would have worked. But I didn't know that we needed to do that. So Kraft Lunchables — the reason that your kids are eating lead and cadmium in part is because they covered up one of the products that would have maybe been very fart-filled but didn't have lead and cadmium…
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