This is how it happened.
The faceless guys in marketing gathered together in a boardroom littered with charts, laptops, and bowls of snacks.
Twelve back-to-back PowerPoint presentations indicated that consumers still like the old kind of corn chip, but a growing number have stopped buying them. It was a daylong brainstorming session, and no one had come up with any good solutions. Yet.
“It’s the media,” sniffed one guy. “They keep saying this stuff is unhealthy. But it’s not!”
“But what can we do?” asked another. “Too many people are eating better. It’s going to drive us out of business!”
“I’ve got it,” said another guy. He had a peculiar look on his face. “Let’s add something healthy to the chips!” He leaned back in his cushy chair, looking all smug, obviously proud of his idea.
“Like what?” asked the other guy. “You mean something healthy?”
“How about peanuts?” suggested someone from the back. Everyone turned to see which idiot was pitching that one.
“It’s a peanut-free world out there boy-o,” growled one guy. “We can’t go shooting ourselves in the foot.” Then he mumbled something, which may or may not have been the word moron.
“What about something green? And organic! Whatever it is should be green and organic. Surveys show that people like that kind of stuff,” suggested one guy.
“Green? In a corn chip? Like what, organic parsley? You can’t put anything green in a corn chip. Flecks of parsley will just look like roach turds,” said the other guy.
Suddenly, one guy leapt out of his cosy chair. “Hey, you’ve given me a great idea,” he shouted. Everybody turned around. It was Idea Guy. He always came up with the good stuff.
“Let’s use flax seeds!”
“Flax seeds? WTF?”
“My wife says they’re full of this Omega crap and is always trying to feed it to us and the kids. But let’s not grind them up to make them more digestible, let’s leave them whole … and just add it to the chips!”
Idea Guy was GOOD. A satisfied rumble filled the boardroom.
“This might work,” commented another guy. “It’s cheaper than grinding them, and that way people who know about flax seeds can recognize right away that these new corn chips are the healthy version of the snack they’ve known and enjoyed their whole lives. And who cares if it makes the chips taste like cardboard! People eat crap like this all the time. They’ll love it… in time.”
More satisfied rumblings were heard around the table, punctuated by the odd slap on the back, as well as short phrases like “let’s celebrate with a drink” and “what time is our tee off in the morning.”
Everybody left the boardroom. Only the corn chips remained.
