by Kevin Burton
Pet rocks I remember. Mood rings, yep. Little sawed-off Gremlin cars. Yeah, I remember those.
I was part of the 70s. I was on the scene baby! I watched the Jackson 5 cartoon. Didn’t dance much but I sang a lot of disco. I remember the bicentennial and staying up all night watching Walter Cronkite in the ultimate celebration of the USA.
Had me some bell bottoms. Watched the Senate Watergate hearings on TV. Thrilled to the exploits of the Big Red Machine.
But this next bit, passed me by completely, until now.
Seems that for a time in 1974, Gerber, the baby food people, actually marketed meals for adults to be eaten right out of a jar.
Can you believe that?
“Gerber Singles” were jars of pureed food in three flavors – Beef Burgundy, Mediterranean Vegetables, and Blueberry Delight. The product was marketed under the slogan, “We were good for you then, we’re good for you now.”
Just heat ‘em and eat ‘em.
In ‘74 I was neither a baby nor an adult, so maybe that’s why this particular product escaped my attention.
We think of New Coke as the stupidest marketing move in history. But the Gerber thing is in the conversation.
Here’s how it all went down.
“In 1974, baby food behemoth Gerber decided to expand its offering to adults with ‘Gerber Singles.’ The idea was that solo adults who weren’t interested in cooking could open up a jar of pureed ham casserole or sweet and sour pork and call it a meal,” wrote Juliet Bennett Rylah on thehustle.co.
But why?
“Business journalist Milton Moskowitz posited that Gerber — a company that once proudly stated that babies were its “only business” — was responding to a nearly 25 percent drop in the US birthrate between 1960 and 1972.”
“At the same time, fewer people were getting married, meaning a lot of folks were eating at home alone,” Bennett Rylah wrote.
The company specified that “Singles were for “whenever you eat alone,” and lamented “how troublesome it was to cook for one’s self while ensuring the right amount of nutrients and avoiding food waste. And, ugh, who wants leftovers?” Bennett Rylah wrote.
“Unsurprisingly, people were not stoked to try pudding versions of savory meals. Singles lasted about three months before they were pulled from the shelves,” Bennett Rylah wrote.
Gerber Singles was a wacky idea on the surface, but understandable if you know how big companies work, writes Maxwell Wessel in Harvard Business Review.
“Big companies are really bad at innovation because they’re designed to be bad at innovation,” Wessel wrote.
“Instead of developing a novel line of food suited to the needs of busy Americans with distinct branding and its own distribution strategy, Gerber slapped a new label on existing pureed products and shipped them out for placement in a different aisle.”
“Needless to say, working Americans weren’t busting down the doors at Safeway to pick up the latest, greatest flavor of Gerber Singles.
“For those who would admonish Gerber for their approach to transformational innovation, it might be wise to consider that the company did exactly what it was designed to do: create operational efficiency,” Wessel wrote.
“This deeply-rooted tendency goes all the way back to a corporation’s typical life cycle. In it’s infancy, it’s designed to bring innovation to the market. A start-up’s success is not gauged by earnings or quarterly reports; it’s measured by how well it identifies a problem in the market and matches it to a solution.”
“If venture capitalists think entrepreneurs have identified a big problem with an interesting solution, they’ll fund the start-up. If those entrepreneurs match and improve this solution, they’ll see growth in revenues and, ultimately, profitability.”
“But that’s not what life is like within a mature organization,” Wessel wrote. “When corporations reach maturity, the measure of success is very different: it’s profit.”
“Once a business figures out how to solve its customers’ problems…seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery. “
“It’s only natural that Gerber executives created a product for adults that looked and felt just like its product for children. The product design allowed them to use their existing processes for sourcing and distributing food as well as empowered them to use excess manufacturing capacity.”
“It may seem like a foolish endeavor at first, but Gerber for adults wasn’t destined for failure, Wessel wrote. “The idea had merit, and the trends the executive team noticed were real. Just look at any smoothie section in your local grocery store.”
Bennett Rylah agrees.
… “People love a good smoothie, with some costing $20. Perhaps if Gerber had stuck to fruity, nutty flavors, hadn’t sold them in little glass jars, and added a little bee pollen, they’d have been a hit.”
That’s all well and good. But I see the name Gerber and I think of a mommy reaching out that spoonful of goo, and I am instantly and irretrievably, NOT, hungry.
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