6 ms·

What's amazing about this to me is less than she had two powdered-cheese-related food product hits, and more that she was able to make such a generic product, a

• adventured 6y ago
  The cloning problem is as old as consumer products is. It's not happening faster, people just don't know the history. That's why there were a billion auto makers in old Detroit, all cloning eachother rapidly. Those automobiles were more complex and difficult to manufacture than hoverboards. If you're trying to compete in such a saturated segment, you have the same competitive targeting as has always existed since consumer goods became a mainstream thing. You can try to build a brand of some manner, which provides a self-constructed moat against competition (this is what Smartfood represented). You can lower your prices under everyone else and give up margin, in which case you compete through executing better than everyone else (being able to survive on 3%-5% profit margins). You can leverage a network you possess, human connections, to gain an advantage over your competition in one of the industry tiers (manufacturing, marketing, distribution, etc). You can cheat, bribe, get your competition put out of business (Preston Tucker was attacked that way; and it's common throughout most of the world). You can use a resource advantage, for example capital - you can out-spend the competition (economies of scale; locking up manufacturing (Apple does this); advertising, which ties to brand building), or sue them out of existence if they're far weaker (Microsoft was almost bankrupted early in its existence with this tactic). Not much has actually changed structurally in a century about how all of these things work.
  • scythe 6y ago
    Another thing Annie really excelled at was distribution, up to and including leaving boxes lying around. Amusingly, this too has been done with scooters, but not (yet) hoverboards. But distribution is especially important for a product like macaroni and cheese which is sold everywhere, and Annie's really does have (in my experience) good market penetration, which I suspect predates the investor buyout. Cars and hoverboards on the other hand are only sold in a few places or on the Internet, which means you have to compete elsewhere.
  • timr 6y ago
    > It's not happening faster, people just don't know the history. That's why there were a billion auto makers in old Detroit, all cloning eachother rapidly. Those automobiles were more complex and difficult to manufacture than hoverboards. Maybe. I don't know enough about the market for auto makers in old Detroit. But my suspicion is that no matter how fast they were, they were nowhere near as fast as we see microbrands pop up today. Pretty much any consumer manufactured good you care to search for on Amazon has not just one, but multiple weird micro-brands jostling for superior ranking. Brands form, rise and fall within a year or two. Maybe it has happened in the past, but it's definitely more hectic than any period in my lifetime. I agree with everything in your second paragraph, but I think you're largely just stating the difficulty of business in a world where "making the product" is not the principal challenge. If anyone can contract manufacture a widget on spec and have it shipped from China for a few tens of thousands of dollars, then most people can do that part, and the game boils down to how efficiently you can market your product to a mass audience and poke your head above the crowd. This basically just boils down to "get attention by any means necessary" (which explains a lot about the internet and media today, and why you see so many celebrities-turned-investors achieving success. If you're already famous and rich, the job is 80% done.) For the particular example of macaroni and cheese, I'm still amazed that this lady had enough time to build a brand via the sorts of shoe-leather techniques she used. I guarantee that if you tried this today, multiple opportunistic "hustlers" would clone your product and have equally well-developed branding before you had it in a dozen stores.
• GordonS 6y ago
  What's amazing to me, as someone who cooks, is that "mac n' cheese" (we call it "macaroni cheese" here in UK) as a pre-prepared meal is even a thing in the US. I consider macaroni cheese as a "comfort food" - one of those things that's a perfect ratio of carbs and fat. But it's a very easy thing to make, even for a novice, in 20 minutes when you're taking your time. I remember my mother teaching me how to make it before going to university, the very first thing I'd ever cooked - I remember thinking, "wow, is that it?!". And it's the sort of thing that is always going to be at least 2x better if you make it yourself, because you use actual cheese (sounds so weird saying that as a Brit!), as mature as you like, and as much as you like. I'm very obviously not the target market now, but even as a cash and time-strapped student a lifetime ago, whose mum had tought him cooking basics just few months previously, I still don't get how someone could make a fortune out of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • jdminhbg 6y ago
    I am not sure how you make macaroni and cheese that it only takes 20 minutes. Just getting the water boiling, adding the macaroni, cooking it, and draining it is going to take at least 15. I am not a mac & cheese fan, much less an instant mac & cheese fan, but it's not at all surprising to me that convenience foods exist. And for what it's worth, it's much more popular in Canada than the US.
    • hervature 6y ago
      Where we call it KD after the biggest producer of it, Kraft Dinner.
      • caymanjim 6y ago
        In the US, the same product is labeled "Kraft Macaroni & Cheese", and in the US everyone calls it "macaroni & cheese" or "mac & cheese". It's the identical product as Kraft Dinner. I wish that branding caught on in the US, because it's so much easier to say "KD".
    • hcho 6y ago
      We have kettles and water boils in about 2 mins.