What Happened to Talenti?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capitalizing on the good name of the company until they wear it down completely.
- Sell brand to megacorp/PE for hundreds of millions or billions.
- Brand gets "optimized for cost" so buyer gets an ROI.
- By the time the public has soured on the brand, the buyout has paid for itself plus profit.
The solution would be to launch these products with high margin built in, but then everybody scoffs at the cost and you die in the womb.
The unicorn solution is that you actually invent a way of producing the high value thing for very cheap, cheaper than everybody else, so you can compete on price while still having top-shelf inputs. But man, that problem is about 5 orders of magnitude more difficult to solve than simply coming up with a product people will like.
If you think corporations are ultimate incarnation of pure greed, and consumers are clear minded rational actors bringing an honest offer to the table...well, start a business and see
And so the founder has a very valuable asset (a brand that is popular) but has also lost the thing he loved about the job (making a specialty product for discerning customers).
There is nothing unreasonable or greedy about exiting at that point. Let someone who wants to run a mature food business do so, and enjoy a well-deserved payout after years of hard work. All the discerning customers who care deeply about quality move on to the next thing, and normies who just like the brand name won't mind the changes.
Distribution is a huge problem for small companies. So you almost have to sell to a bigger firm to get beyond a certain size.
- PRODUCT: The corporation
- RESOURCE: The users of the corporate software/hardware (which is actually resource feed)
- CUSTOMER: Investors/VC/PE/Megacorp
A lot of irony in that name with all the written AI slop.
She frequently complained about the Talenti line having issues. When it was acquired they had contractual responsibilities to produce the gelato a certain way. One thing I remember is it used sugar in granular/powdered form, whereas all the other ice creams used a syrup. So they had giant hoppers of sugar, which of course are a big explosion hazard so there was a lot of equipment around that to keep it from blowing up.
I do remember the tight lids thing, heh. They were well aware...
Ben & Jerry's is also a Unilever brand but manufactured in Vermont (but largely not the one that everyone tours). I think that one is even more complicated because of all the little mix-in ingredients and stuff. And I remember at one point they had these "pint slices" which were packaged as rectangular prisms and had to be cut by enormous, very sharp knives, which caused a fair number of worker injury events.
Since then she's moved on to manufacturing other things. As a purely digital guy, I'm always fascinated by the "real world" things that physical goods have to deal with.
Made. RIP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choco_Taco
I'm not associated with Nancy's Fancy but I will absolutely shill for it. Wonderful stuff.
One gimmick I quite detest is the use of highly concave bottoms some companies use, so as to reduce the volume of actual product. Similar to deep indentations orange juice bottles use as a "handle" but which actually exists to reduce the volume of juice.
It’s also a fun social thing especially with young kids.
Companies need to be taught that if they enshittify they die.
Anyone who has read schumpeter could predict this. It's disappointing how few people in the forums of the capital of VC recognize this: production methods should be nationalized at the point of enshittification or you end up in the current shithole.
So even bullshit is getting enshittified.