Why Nestle's Idea of Synergy is Heartburn in a Box
Ever since Nestle bought Kraft's (KFT) frozen pizza business a little over a year ago, someone at the Swiss-based company has apparently been working overtime to come up with manifestations of corporate synergy. And here's what they've created -- DiGiorno three meat pizza packaged together with boneless "wyngz," and pepperoni pizza with Nestle Tollhouse cookie dough.
That's right -- two products housed in one box, presumably because Nestle has figured out that it's just too difficult for people to hunt through frozen food aisles looking for cookie dough tins and chicken wings. The exact offerings are as follows:
- Three meat or supreme pizza with honey barbecue boneless wyngz
- Pepperoni pizza with buffalo-style wyngz
- Pepperoni or cheese pizza and Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough
Really. For the estimated 60 million Americans who suffer from gastroesophageal reflux, which is the new way of saying heartburn, pizza remains one of the big culprits. Scarfing down some delicious, gooey chocolate chip cookies right after eating pizza will be like throwing gasoline onto a fire.
More troubling from a public health point of view, though, is that Nestle's efforts to boost frozen pizza sales will come at the expense of the fallen willpower of its overweight customers. By bundling sugary, fatty products together like this, the company is effectively enticing people to eat more, then charging them for it -- the 2 in 1 products cost more than the company's regular mate-less pizzas.
Nestle will insist that it's just giving customers the time-saving convenience of not having to buy these products separately, but it's hard to imagine that the company hasn't already calculated the amount of incremental sales they hope these products will generate. That is, sales from people who wouldn't otherwise be adding cookies or wings to their frozen pizza purchase.
From Nestle's perspective, the biggest problem is that these products aren't likely to be successful in the marketplace because, like White Castle's Chicken Rings and KFC's (YUM) infamous Double Down and Mashed Potato Bowl, they have a considerable yuck factor. Pizza and cookies can certainly go together, but only when we decide to put them together. Pizza and wings -- sorry wyngz -- work a little better, but buying them in the same box still looks a bit gluttonous.
Not to mention fake. These aren't actually wings because, as Nestle is required to note, they don't contain any wing meat. They're "white meat chicken fritters," which perhaps accounts for the krazy spelling.
Image from DiGiorno's Facebook page
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