True Confections (28 page)

All the settlement agreements (the file, which was incomplete, owing both to the pandemonium surrounding this time period and to Howard’s habitual slapdash approach to paperwork, showed fourteen different agreements, but I believe there were closer to twenty) cost Zip’s Candies something like half a million dollars. Rubin & Sons was among the litigants with whom Zip’s settled.

Never again, declared Frieda, blaming me for the miscalculation with the clove and peppermint formulation, although it was never determined where the error occurred in the mixing of the overconcentrated production batch. Frieda then became weirdly triumphant about this disaster, conveniently forgetting that her precious bumblebee Howdy had anything to do with it, because it offered concrete proof that she was right and I was wrong about the risks of Zip’s Candies venturing one inch beyond the familiar territory of Eli’s original Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos.

Howard let her dictate company policy on this. Not only would Zip’s never again venture into new product development, but also Zip’s would never even consider any brand extensions within the lines. None whatsoever. We had been burned. We had learned our lesson. That was that. No more risk-taking. I should never have repeated to Howard one of his father’s favorite remarks about business practice, “It’s easier to stay out of trouble than to get out of trouble.”

The way Howard wouldn’t listen to reason on this subject (meaning he wouldn’t listen to me and instead chose to honor his mother’s arbitrary edict) created a paralysis that no ordinary board of directors of a small business would tolerate in any
corporate plan; shareholders would be indignant. But Zip’s has never had any checks and balances. This de facto zero-growth policy remained in place for the rest of Frieda’s life, even at the point when she was no longer able to remember her own opinions or understand very much of what was going on around her, and if foot-long, tutti-frutti Tigermelts had been coming off the line it would have been fine with her. But even after her death, Howard continued to coast with this lazy approach, right up to the day he left for Madagascar.

Howard grew bored with Zip’s over the past few years, and this restriction has suited his indifferent management style. I cannot emphasize enough just how severely damaging this artificial limitation has been on Zip’s Candies’ ability to innovate and expand in natural ways. And I am not just making this observation because I am angry and hurt that in this same time period it became more and more obvious that Howard also lost interest in me.

I don’t mean that we need to develop entirely new products willy-nilly. Completely new products can be hideously costly for many reasons, especially if they are pieces that cannot be made with simple adaptation on our existing lines, the way Index and Detox, our contract energy bars, are run on the Tigermelt line ten days of the month with minimal retooling. (They are so similar in formulation to each other, there is little adjustment downtime needed between the two runs, which is very efficient for us. The Detox bar has ground flaxseeds and dried blueberries in the base, while the Index bar has acai and goji berries, but their proprietary ten-gram-protein base is identical.)

I am not, despite the insulting language in Irene’s ridiculously long-winded and crazy affidavit, trying to run the company into a ditch, and I am not, despite her allegations, proposing the development of any entirely new lines that are not extensions of existing
lines. Painful as it is to admit, I do concede that a while ago I was motivated to experiment with brand extensions partly in the hope that a brilliant and successful development might reengage Howard in the business of Zip’s Candies. Maybe Howard would have come back to me if Dark Mint Tigermelt Fun Bites had gone into production and had really taken off; who can say? I’ll never know.

Zip’s Candies has neglected some very obvious brand extension opportunities for decades. Even with stagnating sales—especially with stagnating sales!—we are overdue for some growth in those areas. For example, because the consumer continues to be extremely willing to increase purchases when he sees a familiar piece in a new flavor, I predict that the best growth in nonchocolate and gummy candies will continue to be in the tropical flavor category. This is why we should be making Tropical Mumbo Jumbos (which we could also call Hawaiian Mumbo Jumbos; we would have to pick whichever one tested more positively), in flavors like pomegranate, pineapple, coconut, and mango. We wouldn’t have to change anything on the line other than the flavoring and the coloring in the blend to make limited-edition Tropical Mumbo Jumbos, for example, in two different combinations of those four flavors, thereby retaining the familiar two-color, two-flavor pack that consumers know so well in the Mumbo Jumbos. We could do new label graphics like our present design but in tropical colors, with palm trees. Frankly, I can’t see how we could fail if we tested Tropical Mumbo Jumbos in movie boxes.

Limited editions are a good way to test a market, because their limitedness makes people rush to buy them before they disappear, and at the same time, if the product is really successful, there is room to keep it going, or at least to bring it back seasonally if that’s appropriate. There are so many possibilities for
limited editions, too; a Dark Tigermelt, which would be a dark chocolate–coated Tigermelt with a milk-chocolate stripe, for example. Or a White Tigermelt, which would be, obviously, a white chocolate–coated Tigermelt with a dark-chocolate stripe. It would be ridiculously easy to produce Mint Tigermelts, or Almond Tigermelts, or Crispy Tigermelts, with sugar wafers or crisped rice in the mix (either will reduce calories); that’s another potential growth area we are neglecting at our peril: the reduced calorie, “light” version of the familiar piece—which can be anything from one-hundred-calorie stick versions with the same formulation to going a half step away from the original piece while developing a related yet distinct new product, like, for example, Annabelle’s Skinny Hunk extension from their Big Hunk.

Another option for a Zip’s brand extension, though it would be an expensive undertaking (because even with the same ingredients and basic formulation, all the equipment would have to be changed over, as would the wrapping and packaging), would be to introduce different sizes of our existing lines. Historically, Zip’s Candies has never had any interest in making Halloween snack sizes. Sam believed that selling snack sizes (or bite sizes, fun sizes, minis, to name some of the common terms) would only be undercutting our own business, offering our customers a chance to go smaller instead of bigger.

Perhaps that was once true, and there is certainly value in driving consumers away from total dependence on Halloween miniatures, or Mars wouldn’t have developed their 2008 Halloween campaign featuring the brilliantly manipulative slogan “Really cool moms give full-size bars!” But actually, size change-up attracts consumers, with increased sales of classic pieces when they are offered both smaller and bigger than the original piece. I heard from someone who knows someone who works at Mars that their studies show that when they first tested their bite-size
Snickers, people ended up eating one and a half bars’ worth, a bite at a time, even though their written responses immediately after the sampling estimated that they had eaten less than half a bar!

You would think that with all my ambition for change and innovation at Zip’s, I might have considered experimenting on some brand extension with myself, changing my hairstyle, for example, or having my colors done, as Marie Smith, one of our bookkeepers, did a few years ago (as a consequence, having discovered she was a Summer, all Marie ever wore after that were outfits in pastel blue, pink, lavender, and red, and what’s more her nail polish always matched those outfits). Perhaps I should have done something like that to try to keep Howard. If I had a close friend, maybe this is the sort of thing she would have advised me to do. But I don’t have anyone in my life to advise me about things such as this, and I am just not the sort of woman who would make desperate changes to my appearance in an undignified attempt to keep my husband. If that’s all it would have taken to save my marriage, what kind of man would Howard have been all along? I didn’t want to risk finding out.

In any case, the changes I wanted to make were at Zip’s Candies, and I know I am right about this. In this era of chronic dieting and a kind of pseudo health consciousness, people who wouldn’t dream of buying a couple of full-size candy bars are willing to take home a bag of minis and work their way through the equivalent of four bars instead. And the truth is, the snack size, fun bite, healthy mini, whatever we would call them, has a bigger markup, piece for piece, ounce for ounce. Tigerbites! Baby Sammies! Mini Mumbo Jumbos! And at the same time, because America loves a bargain and people are willing to consume buckets of coffee and soda when they are offered the chance for a few pennies more than the reasonable-size option, we should be producing larger versions of each of our lines as
well. Tiger Kings! Big Sammies! Mega Mumbo Jumbos! Zip’s has absolutely got to do this, go small and big. That’s where the money is.

The huge growth area in recent years, as we know, is in premium chocolate. Contrary to Irene’s insistence that we should be producing an organic, fair trade premium bar, there is no way we can or should extend our brands in that direction. Zip’s Candies doesn’t make gourmet premium chocolate products. We know who we are. Our customers expect a certain kind of candy from Zip’s. I believe it is a mistake to stray too far from our brand identity.

I don’t understand why Mars wants to dilute the M&M’s line to the extent that they have with those iridescent Premiums. (Which are delicious.) Why not expand the Dove line this way instead? There have been numerous successful M&M’s brand extensions, from Almond, to Dark, to Minis, to some innovative limited editions like Mint Crisp and Wildly Cherry. In both cases, the limited-edition product was a great match for the brand for several reasons, one being the logical and pleasing color coordination. But the new M&M’s Premiums taste like a Dove product and lack the classic M&M’s shell. This, to me, is confusing, and challenges the very definition and identity of M&M’s. Why do it?

It is possible to go too far with brand extensions, no question. I am by nature cautious, and I would propose an extension only with much thought and planning. There are some really pointless extensions out there, cautionary exemplars of what not to do, like the Milky Way 2 To Go, which is a king-size Milky Way simple divided into two pieces, making it, what, more portable? So it can be eaten “on the go” without the usual elaborate preparations and accoutrements ordinarily required for the consumption of an unwieldy ordinary one-piece Milky Way? Maybe
there is a calculation here that I am underestimating, that people will buy and eat more candy if they tell themselves they deserve it because they are always “on the go,” as if the reward for the virtue of busyness is this 460-calorie bar divided into two convenient pieces. Zip’s Candies would never insult our customers that way.

But there are numerous good examples for us to consider, from the Sour Apple Abba-Zaba, the Abba-Zaba Chocolate Cream, and Abba-Zaba Mini Morsels, important extensions to consider when you think about how iconic and unchanged that piece has been for decades, to the exceptionally appealing White Kit Kat. (Kit Kat is a bar with spectacular success, especially in the UK, where forty-seven Kit Kats are consumed every second, if you can trust Nestlé Rowntree’s statistic.)

And let us pause a moment to admire the outstanding Twix Java, one of the most successful brand extensions I have ever tasted. When will Mars bring that fabulous bar back? How could they be willing to go so far down the wrong road with M&M’s, yet throw away the huge success of this Twix extension? In the three months it was on store shelves, more Twix Java bars were probably sold than the total number of pieces we sell in a year, all three lines combined. We live on that, but it’s just crumbs off the table for Mars.

Z
IP’S IS TOO
small to have marketing research, or even marketing. We have no product development like Mars, no matter what the documentation concerning the Bereavemints episode might suggest. The big three have test kitchens ten times the size of our entire operation. We employ forty-seven souls when we’re at full throttle. The big three will always have us outranked and outflanked and outspent, they will always command the best
shelf real estate, with their endless capacity to pay hideous slotting fees, and they will always outsell us eight ways, with presell deals that really move the merch.

And yet, companies like Mars and Hershey’s don’t have all the answers. They make mistakes. And we have the advantage, in our smallness, or we should, that we can follow our hearts, we can turn on a dime, and we aren’t at the mercy of the vast machinery of a marketing department. I know this sounds immodest, but after all these years at Zip’s, I have perfect pitch for the candy business. I can go to a supermarket candy aisle and talk to people about their choices, and with my expertise and experience I can come away from an encounter like that with a useful impression of consumer thinking equal to a six-figure marketing report.

I mentioned the Abba-Zaba, a curious candy, not a personal favorite of mine, but perhaps if I had grown up on the West Coast, I would feel differently. Though maybe not, as I am really not a taffy aficionado at all, and unlike many in my cohort, I harbor no fond yearnings for Bonomo Turkish Taffy or Bit-O-Honey either. When I was six I lost one of my baby incisors in a Sugar Daddy, in the darkness of a movie theater, where I had been taken to see
Mary Poppins
. I will always associate that supremely irritating song about how a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down with the shocking sensation of that sudden, bloody void in my mouth.

Abba-Zaba is a strange piece, with a thin peanut-butter core surrounded by unusually chewy taffy, with a dedicated following; it’s one of those candies people either love or hate. While today it is made by the Annabelle Candy Company, Abba-Zaba was first produced by the Cardinet Candy Company around the same time Eli was starting Zip’s Candies. Cardinet also produced the U-NO; Annabelle bought them in 1978 and now produces
both, along with their flagship bar, Rocky Road, and their Big Hunk and Look! lines, acquired in 1972 when they bought Golden Nugget.