Good Food
At six o'clock in the morning, Tom sat at his glass coffee table, drinking his usual black coffee and eating his usual breakfast, in his usual charcoal suite, scanning his usual digest, The Corporate Journal, as if the sun had brought his usual day.
But the sun brought no such thing. Tom knew this. Indeed, he had anticipated today every day for the previous seven-hundred and thirty, and he had worked one-hundred hour weeks—far above the required forty and unspoken seventy—to ensure that it would bring him what all men sweat for, yet few obtain: immortality.
Tom had often dreamed how he’d make his mark as a business titan. Some start their own companies and win hearts as an innovator. Others do time as a mediocre executive, then slither into academia to secure a legacy on ethos. But these paths had never appealed to Tom. In his mind, the former too brazenly dismissed tradition, and the latter were a bunch of tenured tit-suckers who fled the arena because they didn’t have the guts for real business. As of this morning, Tom’s legacy far outclassed theirs. Under his leadership as CEO, GoodFood, the oldest food company in the world with a fabled, All-American past, was once again the largest and most profitable. Fate gave him the rusty crown of a fallen empire and he made it shine like new.
He tapped to the next page in The Corporate Journal. At the top he saw the rousing headline that cut the ribbon on his fame: The Return of GoodFood, An American Giant. Don’t those words sound great. “An American Giant.” Tom found pride in the idea of his success reaching all the way back to 1917, to the origins of American enterprise, to American hero J.M. McMaster, who founded GoodFood to make meal-kits for The War.
Most historians say weapons, tactics, and antibiotics turned The War in our favor. However, a vocal minority credits our narrow victory to McMaster and GoodFood for fueling our troops with the indomitable will they showed in battle: "If not for McMaster's astounding innovations in food quality preservation, and GoodFood's high production and consistency in a time when all other nations suffered shortages, I would not be writing these words in English." Post war, GoodFood pivoted to household groceries, and cemented itself as a cornerstone of American nutrition. They expanded into staple foods for the family—breads, spreads, dairy—and created fresher, tastier versions of its war-proven canned goods that took over supermarket shelves. High quality, low prices, and their role in The War made the GoodFood brand was good as gold. It wasn’t uncommon to hear people using “GoodFood” as a stand-in for groceries: “Honey, can you pick up some GoodFood later?”
McMaster and GoodFood continued to innovate and expand over the decades, eventually claiming the throne as the largest food company in the entire world in 1950, then the most profitable in 1955. J.M.McMaster died one year later, in 1956.
With the spirit of the company gone, GoodFood’s high tide started to abate. No longer able, or interested, in innovating, GoodFood turned to the strategy Standard Oil made famous: acquire and dominate. And acquire and dominate it did. GoodFood swallowed up all competitors and waged bloody supply chain wars against those that held out. It spent the next decades bludgeoning its way to victory. But by 1990, the company hardly resembled itself. Years of ruthless acquisition had fractured its core-brand into 293 sub-brands, until the name GoodFood meant something only to investors that dealt with its stock (NYSE: GDFD). The disunity led manufacturing quality to plummet. Food spoiled. Costs rose. Ingredients cheapened. The brand collapsed from a series of tiny, compounding apathies. Food industry whistle-blowers started coming forth. The most famous expose, a documentary titled NotSoGoodFood, alleged the company mixed guinea pig into its frozen chicken nuggets; turns out the company had exploited an FDA loophole that didn’t regulate certain rodents as a meat product. GoodFood was gutted. In hindsight, some blame the fall on the company losing McMaster; others, on GoodFood's reputation sunsetting with the generation it raised; others still on the rapid rise of health-consciousness and dietary trends that GoodFood ignored. Whatever the true reason, the GoodFood board of directors fired its chief executive, the latest from a line of uninspiring executives that had promised to restore the company to former glory.
The board had phoned Tom the very next day.
And he had more than delivered. Under Tom's leadership, GoodFood achieved record breaking revenues and profits. They were back.
But Tom would readily admit that he’d benefited from a bit of luck. Just a few months into taking the helm, a rogue virus put the entire world into a headlock. Governments forced people to isolate themselves indoors. Businesses failed. Hundreds of millions of people lost their jobs. The economy spiraled. For most, such a black swan event would all but guarantee failure—but in disaster, Tom saw opportunity.
This flash of opportunity hit him while listening to a routine market assessment report, courtesy of Sloan Consulting:
"And of the 293 brands that make up GoodFood's consumer-product-consumption-offerings, 200 of them fall into the food-marketing-segmentation-category consumers call (flashes air-quotes) Junk Food."
The new-grad consultant had said this with sheepish deference, as if he feared offending Tom. But Tom had not taken offense. Quite the opposite, Tom immediately phoned his old partner at Sloan and recommended the boy for promotion, because his conspicuous use of air-quotes had given Tom a savory idea: with consumers under significant financial distress, now offered the perfect time to rebrand Junk Food into something much more palatable. Budget Bites? No, too demeaning. Convenience Confections? Also no, too sweet. And then he had it: Efficiency Eats.
Tom ran the strategy in his mind, as he’d learned to do in business school:
"It really could offer the perfect strategy for the company. After all, Junk Food—I mean, Efficiency Eats—sells at much better margins than our other product types. It costs way less to make. It lasts longer on shelves. And with the advancements in food science, surely they could improve those factors even more. Cheaper ingredients. Better preservation. More profits. And this should compound in the current economic environment; people have less expendable income than ever and need to make goods last. Efficiency Eats screams savvy, yet substantial. Plus, scarcity makes a consumer base vulnerable—learned that in business school. If done right, this rebranding could make Efficiency Eats the ideal choice breakfast, lunch, dinner—even the perfect midnight snack, if we spin it right. I could get Dr. Diana at Ivy to conduct a study on it—she owes me from 2011. On top of that, we’ve known for decades that the consumers who buy Junk Food fall harder for buzz-words than others. They also have worse spending habits and budgeting skills, lower education levels and standardized scores and literacy rates and…”
In a desolate, barren, unforgiving market cooking all companies like the Sahara, Tom had found an Oasis.