Daniel Lubetzky

This video, launched by Entrepreneur Magazine encapsulates some of the attributes that made KIND’s Daniel Lubetzky win the 2010 Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and carries new meaning since the Award was announced.  Among the key lessons: build a supportive environment for a super-star team, and use technology to simplify life, and food, rather than to complicate it.

Innovator – Kind Snacks from OC Creative Media on Vimeo.

by Adeena Schlussel

by Adeena Schlussel

Confirming KIND’s motto that “it’s usually the nuts that change the world”, Daniel was selected as Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine!  We are so proud.  Here is a link to the story.  And here is a video.

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This awesome article in INC. Magazine, titled, “The Way I Work,” features Daniel and captures exactly how our CEO works! We are super proud that Daniel was featured in INC. and are even prouder that he is the fast paced, driven, successful worker that the article describes!

by Adeena Schlussel

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Lev Grossman wrote an excellent article in TIME on how recommendation engines work (ie, for Netflix movie selection, and for Pandora radio selection) and how they can start turning us into boringly homogenous & predictive blockbuster consumers of the same stuff within one safe space.

Alas, when it comes to movie choices, the options and parameters are so many, that suggestions I get are often unreliable.

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by Adeena Schlussel on behalf of Daniel Lubetzky

This article explains the many values of sardines.  Sardines are a plentiful and sustainable fish, but aside from being healthy for our environment, they are good for our bodies as well.  Unfortunately, except for some brands like BELA (a high quality Portuguese brand of Sardines built by my friend Joshua Scherz), most sardine brands are floundering due to their fishiness.  This is why the Sardinistas are trying to “reinvent the sardine” and earn it a spot on the American mainstream palate.  Hopefully their saintly marketing effort will be successful because it is too bad that they are unpopular today.

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Sometimes in business you are faced with the decision to invest up front more capital resources but ensure that over the long term you see savings, vs. save up front, but at a steady higher cost of production per widget on an ongoing basis.

The problem with choosing the path that is "inexpensive" up front is that it not only creates higher costs for the enterprise over the long haul, but it can also generate externalities (costs to society that the enterprise avoids paying).

A case in point is illustrated by this Edge shaving cream picture:

The travel-size version has less product but just as much waste in plastic on the cap and the outpouring device.

You can picture the team responsible for designing the travel-size version figuring that it made all the sense in the world to take advantage of existing infrastructure and just making a smaller bottle for travel by just cutting its height/size.

But years later and millions of cans later, so much more waste – AND COST – is generated because you are using such an inefficient means to provide a product: a fraction of the size in product but as much in caps etc.  It should not have necessarily been this way.  They could have designed a less expensive disposable version – but it would have required an upfront investment in capital.

Too bad.

A lot of "convenience" products like travel

It is interesting that what we are witnessing right now is just simply the digitization of books formerly printed in paper.  For over 500 years, books have been written and conceived with Gutenberg’s guidelines in mind (Gutenberg is the inventor of the mechanical printing press). 

But since the advent of computers and now of the Internet, so many new possibilities have emerged – and yet the printed world has barely changed.  The advent of the Kindle, the iPad and other portable reading devices has so far simply resulted in turning analog print into digital print, while keeping the same linear prose format. 

If you stop to think about it, we are stuck in one model that, while beautiful and applicable for much good, is certainly not the only model to serve all potential needs that books can serve. 

Over the coming years, the whole way we think of e-books and just "books" will probably change.  One day it will not be "surprising" to read, within a book, interactive pictures and images akin to the ones you see in Harry Potter movies – those quirky 3D moving photos within the wizards’ magical newspapers. 

And it is also quite conceivable, indeed likely, that multimedia forms will reinvent how we do storytelling and how we provide information.  Why stick to just prose, or just music, or just newspaper, or just video? Why not create new models for information that combine elements of them all?

Why assume that a linear story is best? Why think that a book is necessarily different from a video-game? Someone will come up with a book that merges some elements of a game with different endings.  Analog examples already exist.  And digital multiple-choice endings already exist.  But we have not even begun exploring all the new possibilities presented by electronic "readers."

And why assume that a book needs to first be written and published, then read, then auctioned off to a Hollywood producer who then helps create a movie version of the movie? Someone will surely create a way to inform or entertain that combines elements of both – and more.

The potential for reinvention of the "book" is so far totally untapped.

Michael Malone from ABC News wrote an interesting article on Apple’s iPhone and its overall new product development strategy, with interesting strategic lessons for new product development and business in general.

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Yesterday I tried Softsoap’s Pure Cashmere Hand soap.  I was struck by the proposition that a soap could contain "cashmere extract" because a while back I had wondered what "cashmere" really was.  Most consumers just know Cashmere sweaters as exceptionally soft but don’t know where "cashmere" comes from, so I guess the marketing team at Softsoap’s parent company, Colgate, figured that they would make things romantic with the cashmere association. 

The trouble is, cashmere is the fur of a type of goat – the cashmere goat.  Colgate tries to connect to this silly gimmick by using "hydrolyzed keratin" – a protein extract from the goat’s hair.  This ingredient, besides being the least present in the formula (see label), has no discernible impact on the purported features of the product.  It is just used for smoke and mirrors.  Too bad that most consumers have not yet caught up with this deception – though I did find one colorful site that brought them to task on it.

You’d think Colgate would be a bit more responsible with its claims and advertising.

Then again, liquid soap is a modern invention that pollutes water at such greater levels than regular soap, for the sheer fact that it is used in much ampler and less efficient form than regular bars of soap.  The same reason why companies created shower gels and liquid soaps  – because they can command a higher price and accomplish more turns than using regular soap bars – is also the reason why consumers should avoid using such products, which harm the environment and are just wasteful.

I’ve always enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell, and yet some of his over-simplified discoveries have troubled me because they often ignore some logical alternatives to his explanations.  Now in the New York Times Book Review, Steven Pinker elaborates on this problem. 

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.

In an otherwise interesting (though earlier) New Yorker article on the history of Ketchup, Gladwell naively equates the iconic and amusing Grey Poupon advertising campaign to challenge French’s Mustard with the store-sampling efforts of one Massachusetts fancy ketchup entrepreneur to challenge Heinz Ketchup.  Gladwell frames the story to imply that this Ketchup entrepreneur won’t stand a chance to break the Heinz Ketchup empire because Ketchup is fundamentally different from mustard.  It may well be true that Ketchup is different from mustard, but in this particular example, it is far more relevant that Grey Poupon’s multi-million dollar campaign is different from one guy selling one version of fancy tomato sauce from a truck.

That said, I heartily recommend this article on the history of Ketchup – and how Heinz came to dominate the space so thoroughly.

The excerpt below particularly resonated with me, as it accurately describes a challenge you need to embrace and be aware of when you create a new food product – as when we design new KIND flavors – that the final product must add up to much more than just the sum of the individual components; its notes must join to create a transcendental melody that works magically together as one:

After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth.  "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing ‘Ode to Joy’ on the piano," Chambers says.  "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist."  Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude.  So are Hellman’s mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake.  When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt.  You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi.  But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket.  "The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says.  "They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance.  It’s very hard to do that well.  Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s"— and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—"all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out.  And then the cinnamon.  Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep.  A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."