I vote for Pringles as one of the worst, successful products in American business history. How about you? Pringles is an invented “food” cooked up in a research lab at Proctor and Gamble. When you understand how they came into being, you understand a great deal about American business and what has happened to our general food supply over the last fifty to sixty years. It also helps to explain the distorted priorities of American business.

While news reports today (4.6.11) say that they were created to last longer because P&G lacked the distribution channels to get them to the stores quickly enough, that is only part of the story. They wanted a product that would last longer because they could keep selling it when other traditional potato chips might have spoiled. The rounded shape that stacks so nicely in a can? Guess what, that reduces shipping costs because big, loose bags of chips take up more room on trucks. By making a uniform product that could be stacked, P&G saved millions over the years on shipping.

This is what I would call reverse engineering: creating a product to meet the needs of a business rather than the needs of the public. The game is to invent a product that works better for the company selling it and worry about the customer next or last. How can we get people to buy something that makes more money for us whether it is good or  not?

They needed a product that would suit their distribution channels for hand soap and detergents, something that would last a long time. When they came out, Pringles hardly represented an improvement in taste or health benefits for those who consumed them. But, they met the goals of the company and today the brand is being sold for 2.3 billion dollars.

When you understand that we are being marketed to buy stuff we don’t need that has been created in a lab to meet the profit requirements of the business selling it, then you can see how much trouble we are in with regard to food generally. Making products “long lasting” on the grocery shelf and in shipping generally requires chemicals and processes which remove the vitamins and minerals from them. Some of the chemicals might also be damaging to health and most of them have never been fully tested for ingestion into humans. Admittedly, a potato chip was not great to start with before Pringles. Making it into an industrial, mass produced product that could sit on shelves for months was not really an improvement for the buying public, but a great success for Proctor and Gamble.

Doug Terry, 4.6.11

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