What Happened to Talenti?
nytimes.com43 points by tysone 5 hours ago
43 points by tysone 5 hours ago
A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capitalizing on the good name of the company until they wear it down completely.
- Launch amazing brand with tight/negative margins to drive heavy consumer adoption
- Sell brand to megacorp/PE for hundreds of millions or billions.
- Brand gets "optimized for cost" so buyer gets an ROI.
- By the time the public has soured on the brand, the buyout has paid for itself plus profit.
The solution would be to launch these products with high margin built in, but then everybody scoffs at the cost and you die in the womb.
The unicorn solution is that you actually invent a way of producing the high value thing for very cheap, cheaper than everybody else, so you can compete on price while still having top-shelf inputs. But man, that problem is about 5 orders of magnitude more difficult to solve than simply coming up with a product people will like.
The best solution for everyone is to come up with a quality product that people like, price it fairly, and then don't enshittify it. Win-win!
Not "everyone" -- if you're the owner of a successful ice cream brand who spent a decade grinding in the ice cream game, cashing out the brand equity and getting to live on a yacht might feel better.
I'm not sure if you are kidding or not, it would be a funny sarcastic remark in the right circles, but if serious, this exact line of thinking is exactly why things like indie-go-go and kick starter are just absolute meat grinders of starry-eyed individuals.
a lot of these products have been around for too long for it to fit the model you're proposing
And you must ask yourself, is the ability to sell your company to another company a benefit or should there be considerably stronger hurdles for this kind of thing?
The modern SV corporate model is:
- PRODUCT: The corporation
- RESOURCE: The users of the corporate software/hardware (which is actually resource feed)
- CUSTOMER: Investors/VC/PE/Megacorp
> And you must ask yourself, is the ability to sell your company to another company a benefit or should there be considerably stronger hurdles for this kind of thing?
Distribution is a huge problem for small companies. So you almost have to sell to a bigger firm to get beyond a certain size.
why would ask myself that, i have nothing to do with the owners or buyers.
Heh, my wife was the maintenance supervisor for the Missouri Unilever plant that makes Talenti (well, not Unilever anymore). The same plant also makes Breyer's, Magnum bars, Choco Tacos, Popsicles, and various other novelties.
She frequently complained about the Talenti line having issues. When it was acquired they had contractual responsibilities to produce the gelato a certain way. One thing I remember is it used sugar in granular/powdered form, whereas all the other ice creams used a syrup. So they had giant hoppers of sugar, which of course are a big explosion hazard so there was a lot of equipment around that to keep it from blowing up.
I do remember the tight lids thing, heh. They were well aware...
Ben & Jerry's is also a Unilever brand but manufactured in Vermont (but largely not the one that everyone tours). I think that one is even more complicated because of all the little mix-in ingredients and stuff. And I remember at one point they had these "pint slices" which were packaged as rectangular prisms and had to be cut by enormous, very sharp knives, which caused a fair number of worker injury events.
Since then she's moved on to manufacturing other things. As a purely digital guy, I'm always fascinated by the "real world" things that physical goods have to deal with.
> The same plant also makes ... Choco Tacos
Made. RIP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choco_Taco
Agreed that this happens to a lot of specialty products, but for some reason Ice Cream (or in this case gelato) always seems to go through this cycle. Its like a 10 year cycle from introduction to popularity to selling out and going with cheaper ingredients and before you know it the brand is tarnished and some other brand has taken the mantle.
The best arbitrage was that purchasing a jar like that (empty, a la carte) would cost $3. So you were basically getting amazing ice-cream for $2. Half my pantry became reused Talenti jars.
They mention Jeni's. Now that is premium ice cream. Their "darkest chocolate" and "milkiest chocolate" flavors are the only chocolate ice creams I like, because they actually taste liko eating chocolate.
Oh yeah, my partner and I noticed this when our local grocery store had a sale on Talenti. It just... wasn't very good. Like it was just OK. For that grocery store, Nancy's Fancy is next to Talenti and - for a couple bucks more - you get something that is absolutely delicious.
I'm not associated with Nancy's Fancy but I will absolutely shill for it. Wonderful stuff.
I got 3 jars for sale for under $9 last week so while the quality has probably dropped it's usually the cheapest gelato product at the supermarket.
Putting 2 servings of ice cream in a thick plastic jar was always a dumb gimmick.
>> Putting 2 servings of ice cream in a thick plastic jar was always a dumb gimmick.
One gimmick I quite detest is the use of highly concave bottoms some companies use, so as to reduce the volume of actual product. Similar to deep indentations orange juice bottles use as a "handle" but which actually exists to reduce the volume of juice.
Same thing that happened to every other brand on earth: product quality was sacrificed to serve profit. Even the seemingly well-meaning Ben and Jerry's fell.
Anyone who has read schumpeter could predict this. It's disappointing how few people in the forums of the capital of VC recognize this: production methods should be nationalized at the point of enshittification or you end up in the current shithole.
Looks like classic enshittification to me. It doesn't only apply to software and services.
A farmer was complaining to me that the quality of manure he gets to spray on his fields has declined as it now goes through some process which extracts certain apparently valuable chemicals from it first.
So even bullshit is getting enshittified.