New Jersey Monthly

Worth it!

(continued)

"Rip People's Heads Off"

Worth started a consulting firm, but that was mainly to stay in the industry while he worked on his scheme for the newest hole in the marketplace -- Frookies, a name that combines fruit and cookies. Health was becoming hot, oat bran would soon be the holy grail, and Worth sensed supermarkets would be crying out for a healthy cookie that tasted good.

Worth and his wife Randye devised the cookie in her little Manhattan apartment. At the time, Randye ran a weight-loss clinic in the day and baked cookies at home at night. After going through 2,000 pounds of dough trying to make fruit and chocolate into a palatable combination, the cookie was perfected in the tiny test kitchen just a few days before its debut at the Fancy Food Show in Chicago in 1988.

"I stepped back and here's the moment of entrepreneurial terror that everyone has," says Worth. "I would not touch one of my cookies. And the first person who came out to taste it was a woman retailer. She picks it up, brings it to her mouth and starts chewing and my stomach is going a mile a minute. I said to her, 'Well, do you like it? Do you like it?' She said, 'Yes, it's very good.' I said, 'Do you like it? DO YOU LIKE IT!' She likes it!

"At that moment, I knew we were going to rip people's heads off."

But getting a new product, no matter how good, into supermarkets is no easy task. Each year, supermarket buyers are inundated with some 12,000 new products. The average supermarket can only stock 31,000 items in total. So frequent are requests to sell a new product that supermarkets now charge a "slotting fee" of anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000 to simply try a new item on the shelf.

Many entrepreneurs can't afford this levy. However, most large food companies are only too happy to fork over the cash. The result, according to experts: Large companies with huge advertising budgets can get a mediocre product on the shelf by outmuscling less-capitalized newcomers.

To avoid slotting fees, Worth gave supermarkets freestanding displays so they could test the product without relinquishing their valuable shelves; once the product became in demand, many markets moved Frookies into the cookie section without slotting fees.

"A lot of buyers who might ordinarily say no to him get concerned because he's so outspoken, and because of that he gets his product in places where others might not," says Jules Rose, president of Sloan's Supermarket in New York.

The rest of Worth's marketing approach to Frookies was likewise unconventional and thrifty. Worth hired young sports stars to push his product in an inexpensive stunt called "Rookies For Frookies." He opened up his books completely to Inc. magazine for one of its "Anatomy of a Start-Up" pieces. "That wasn't brilliant," Worth says in retrospect, "but we wanted publicity and couldn't afford to pay for TV."

Unlike Sorrell Ridge, Worth's planning for Frookies was meticulous. He spent a year alone devising the attention-getting Frookies package, a weird and compelling ultra-violet contraption. And forget banks. To keep finances under control and maintain high enthusiasm, the stockholders would be vendors and suppliers. This eliminated the wall between buyer and seller. Thirty percent of Frookies is now held by distributors, bakers and other providers of services.

"Everyday I talk to him he makes me laugh because he's got some new items he's thinking up, like Animal Frackers and Funky Monkies, and in some of the line extensions the names are so hysterical they work," says Bob Schmitt, marketing vice president for Shur-Good Biscuit Co. in Cincinnati, a Frookies distributor and major stockholder. "He's like a used car commercial where you can't stand the guy, but you listen to him anyway. His mind just keeps turning at a 45 r.p.m. clip when everyone else is at 33 1/3. He's three thoughts ahead of you."(continued)

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