After I successfully passed Aaron and Jason’s test with my performance in Louisville, the partners had their lawyers begin arranging all of our vertical merger documents. I was appointed CEO by the newly assembled board, which immediately started putting their fingers into everything. They inserted their bookkeeper into my company records, they shut down my S Corp and my LLC so we could form a handful of joint ones, and they shut down my business bank account and opened new accounts for our newly formed corporations.
We started having meetings upon meetings for everything. We would use Google Hangouts to dial in to a videoconference, since we were all spread out across the country. Very few things ever got decided in these meetings, but even when they did, it was never the result I wanted. One of our first “group decisions” was to change the name of the retail side of the company from Fit Food to a majority-voted Lean Eats, which I wasn’t particularly fond of. Luckily, it didn’t matter, since we were now primarily a production company, rather than a retailer, which meant the customers had no clue who was making the food they were eating anyway. We were now shipping CrossFit gyms packages full of “CrossFit Meals,” Gold’s Gyms were retailing “Gold’s Meals,” and customers who ordered our food online had no way of knowing they were on our website. They were ordering their food from what looked to be a food-for-buff-moms website, for example, so a few days after placing their orders, a cooler would arrive at their front doors containing meals labeled something like “Buff Mommy Meals.”
The next group decision was for me to fire the majority of my old crew, so the partners could move the company headquarters to Elizabethtown and bring in their own staff to run all the operations. “It would be better to start fresh,” Jason assured me. This little maneuver rendered everyone who’d helped me get my business off the ground jobless and put a few lifelong friendships on hiatus, which made me feel every bit the shitty friend I was for allowing it to happen. Stolichnaya served as an interim friend.
I was able to save Kevin, Babs, and, for some reason, Casey. They became my B-team chefs. Their job would be to design the new meals each month, which would be mass-produced by a new team of cooks in the giant production kitchen we were about to move into. Everyone else would be replaced by new hires. Jason and Aaron’s giant team of fitness coaches replaced my sales crew, Vic, Roger, and—despite my attempt at taking a pay cut in order to keep him on—even Dave, who was the one who initiated the partnership with Jason and Aaron. At night, I laid in bed, wracked with guilt about letting him go.
I thought my life was going to fall apart without Emily around to juggle all the moving pieces, but despite my pleading, she got replaced by a manager named Logan, whom I referred to as Mr. Nervous-Food-Service because he was constantly paranoid that every little thing we did was going to get us into hot water with the health department. According to him, the equipment was never calibrated enough, the labels weren’t ever accurate enough, the cooking procedures weren’t thoroughly detailed enough.
Previously managed by my well-trained team of six, all customer service calls were now handled by one person, Suzy the robotic script reader, which meant that if she was on the other line, then you were listening to hold music. And when a customer finally did get to speak with her, she wouldn’t even adjust her dialogue to match the gender of the person on the other end of the phone. “I do apologize for the inconvenience, ma’am or sir,” she’d say in a frustratingly cheery tone, “I’ll look into this right away.” Then she would breeze right along, as if she’d actually solved the issue. “Ma’am or sir, are there any other issues I can assist you with in the meantime?”
Nobody ever said it out loud, but it was evident that her job was to frustrate callers to the point of giving up. She would routinely tell customers she was going to transfer them to the specialist in such and such department, who could better assist them—of course, no such person existed—and then she would put them on hold for ten minutes before hanging up on them. The ones who had the energy to call back then had to sit through another ten minutes of hold music interspersed with the occasional, “Thank you for holding. Your call is very important to us. Please remain on the line.”
After we had remodeled the staff, Jason the Numbers Nazi wanted to pump a bunch of money into marketing.
A computer algorithm is making you fat. This algorithm is called a digital marketing campaign—dozens of which you’re likely locked into at this very moment, and one of which is possibly mine—built inside a program called Infusionsoft (IFS), which connected to the back end of our brand-new thirty-thousand-dollar website.
This website was a thing of beauty. Not only was it designed to strategically guide visitors through a sales process, but on the back end, it tracked customer purchasing habits so we could better tailor future sales pitches via discounts and special promotions. It also used algorithms to produce spreadsheets that managed our entire inventory, along with a P&L breakdown that tracked all of our affiliates’ sales. It alerted FedEx of our package count and shot all the necessary information and shipping labels to the kitchen each morning. The most impressive thing it did, however, was create an automated customer engagement system run by the IFS software.
IFS observes, tracks, and adjusts to everything you do, from the links you click or hover your mouse over to the emails you open or delete, the YouTube banner ads that you think you’re ignoring when you close them, the things you search for on Google, the Instagram posts you like, the number of times you open a Web page, and practically anything you do on Twitter. Based on your behavior, you get filtered into one of these virtual algorithms—one you’ll probably never even realize you’re trapped in—that tailors our advertisements to match your needs, wants, patterns, and personality traits.
And to answer your question, yes, we can see you. We can tell where you are when you see our marketing—at home, at work, on vacation in Europe—how long you looked at it, whether you clicked through or not, and, of course, whether you bought something. It sounds a little NSA-ish but don’t worry; because there are so many people we’re trying to target, we don’t ever take the time to follow an individual. We’re typically just looking at numbers on a spreadsheet trying to spot overall trends based on your behavior.
How does this work?
A very commonplace tactic we use to move products is called a drip campaign. Let’s say we want to increase our paleo meals sales because they’ve got a decent margin. We’ll design a campaign algorithm like the one on the previous page to start following you around. Maybe the software noticed that you watch The Biggest Loser and you tend to “like” its social media posts, so it responds in a couple of ways: First, it starts posting banner ads on The Biggest Loser’s page and whenever you watch one of its videos on YouTube. Next, you’ll start seeing links to headlines and getting emails educating you on the health benefits of a paleo diet, all the while programming you to (a) believe that this is scientifically backed nutrition information, and, more important, (b) recognize the word paleo.
Then the software gets really sneaky.
Because it knows exactly where you’re located, it will start using emails along with a software called SlyBroadcast that leaves prerecorded voice mails that sound like they’re highly personalized—not to you, but to the fitness experts in your area. These calls offer to help increase the fitness expert’s business profits by encouraging them to promote the paleo diet to people like you in their local community.
The software then sends these fitness experts press releases—written by used car salesman Clint—that they can use to send you emails and physical ads, submit newspaper articles, and spread the message through television segments in your area, all discussing the health benefits of the paleo diet. You start seeing how popular the paleo diet is everywhere you look, and you start to think, Hmm, maybe I should see what all the fuss is about, and what a coincidence that the little coffee shop you visit, the co-op you frequent, the gym you work out at, the banner ads on YouTube, your Facebook feed, and the bottom of the New York Times article you just read, all happen to have paleo-friendly meals for sale.
Gotcha!
“Not me,” you might be thinking. “When those annoying ads pop up on my screen I just X them out. I don’t fall for this kind of stuff!” But what I’m telling you is, you don’t have to pay attention to our marketing for us to get to you. I was able to witness, from the inside, just how stealthily this type of marketing can affect you.
Remember how I told you we don’t ever take the time to follow an individual? Well . . . I did it once—just as a test—and here’s what I saw.
A good friend of mine, a practicing MD, was notorious for taking whatever new nutrition info she would read or hear about, and then turn around and spread it to her patients. One such patient happened to be a client of mine too—the infamous Libby. During this time we were in the middle of searching for an industrial kitchen so we could ramp up our food production, and so over the next couple of transitional months, we wanted to drive consumers to buy supplements like smoothies and protein bars—which we were also now labeling privately and selling to retailers—instead of our food. To achieve this we designed an IFS marketing campaign to educate health experts, like Libby’s doctor, on the benefits of counting calories—that sugar was calorically equivalent to protein, and that real food was equivalent to supplements, and therefore you could interchange them as long as you kept track of your calories. Over the next couple of months Libby’s doctor got bombarded by the IFS drip campaign—on her social media, her email accounts, the blogs she read, and even on her local TV news—and just like clockwork, my MD buddy had relayed the message to Libby.
I was checking in with Manny—who was now training Libby—over the two-month life of the IFS campaign, and he showed me that she had been gaining a steady three pounds per week. When I asked Libby whether she’d been doing anything different, she told me that, per her doctor’s recommendation, she had been replacing her meat-and-veggie meals with Reese’s smoothies and protein bars because they had fewer calories. As a result, after two months of following this nutrition philosophy, she was now twenty-three pounds heavier. She hadn’t even directly seen any of our Infusionsoft marketing. The campaign had made its way to Libby through a credible influencer—her doctor.
The goal wasn’t to make people gain weight; the goal was simply to sell more of our product, and this type of marketing software was insanely effective at achieving this.
We use the most seemingly minuscule consumer actions, demographics, and psychographics to adjust our information and products on the market. Consumers’ heights, ages, the shows they watch, and the things they search for on Google will determine how we get them to buy our products. Even the number of children people have allows us to manipulate them.
For example, did you know that people with kids eat at least ten more servings of sweets per month than people who don’t have kids? So, in order to get parents, who are trying to eat less sugar, to eat more of it, all we have to do is advertise to their kids. Children watch twenty-eight hours of television per week, twenty-one hours of YouTube, and who the hell knows how many hours of those epileptic Vine videos, so by engaging them there, we can convert them into our little sales soldiers. As a result of your kids lobbying you for our sugary foods, we’ll work our product’s foot in the door, which gives the parents a 76 percent chance of eating it.
—
Once we’d gotten our marketing system in place, my next task was to find an industrial kitchen to move into.
I headed back to Virginia and started searching for a new kitchen space. Between being on the road so much and moving into a new neighborhood, I hadn’t seen the Extortion Cougar in a couple of months. She simply didn’t know where to find me.
I’d gotten word from Manny that a woman fitting the description of the Cougar had been frequenting Fit Studio, asking for me. My first day back in my gym, I was in the middle of doing a seated shoulder press with two heavy dumbbells above my head, sitting right beside one of the gym’s very first members, sixty-five-year-young Linda, when the Cougs walked up, right between my legs, stuck her hands down the front of my pants and death-gripped me. I froze. Linda looked down at the Cougar’s buried hand, then looked up to make eye contact with me.
The Cougar said nothing; she just stood there, cupping me while she waited for my arms to give out, which they quickly did, and I had to drop the weights onto the floor by my sides.
I got a membership at Gold’s Gym the next morning.
I don’t know who squealed, but it didn’t take the Cougar long to learn I was there. At first, she tried waiting for me at my car, but when I saw the trap, I shared my conundrum with a fellow gym member and gave him a twenty to pull my car right up to the front door. After a handful of failed parking lot assault attempts, the Cougs started coming into the gym, right in front of everyone, and chasing me around. Nobody intervened. I suppose it was pretty hilarious to watch me weave through the rows of exercise machines, fleeing from an attractive woman.
I got a third membership, this time at . . . sigh . . . Planet Fitness. I knew nobody would think to look for me there, and I started rotating randomly among the three gyms. I also started going to the gym at sporadic times throughout the day to ensure my safety.
—
After a few weeks of searching, I found an industrial kitchen to move our main operation into. It was a forty-three-thousand-square-foot warehouse with long rows of shiny ovens, loading docks, freezer trucks for food transportation, and even USDA-regulated temperature-controlled rooms. The cooking room remained at seventy-two degrees, the main prep room stayed at thirty-five degrees, and the storage room was kept at negative-ten degrees Fahrenheit. If you had a cup of water in your hand and put your arm through the door to the room, the water would begin to crystallize in seconds.
The staff had a field day with the storage room.
The guys loved to hide outside the freezer room door and wait for Li’l Mikey—one of the newly hired cooks, who was only an inch or two over five feet—to walk in without a heavy jacket on, thinking he was just popping in for a quick second to grab something off the shelves, and then slam the door shut and hold it closed. After a couple of minutes, Mikey would start banging on the door and pleading for his freedom. “Fuck you guys—this joke isn’t funny! I can’t feel my fingers; open the door, you assholes!” he would yell, as the guys stood outside the door giggling like schoolgirls.
Poor Li’l Mikey didn’t do well with cold stuff in general.
Dry ice is one-hundred-and-nine degrees below zero. One day we ran out of dry ice, which got delivered once a week, and Mikey drew the short straw to go pick up extra. Unfortunately, none of the guys knew—or, as I suspect, chose—to tell Li’l Mikey that dry ice eats oxygen, which is why it’s normally transported in tightly sealed five-hundred-pound drums, but when you’re transporting a lot of it in open air you’ve got to drive with the windows down. The reason it’s such a dangerous task is that when dry ice eats the oxygen in a confined space, it doesn’t produce a suffocating sensation; it produces a euphoric, sleepy sensation that makes you want to comfortably lean your head back and rest your eyes. Thank the lawsuit gods that Mikey made it to the loading docks and put his car in park before he went unconscious behind the wheel. Luckily, one of the cooks was taking a load of trash out back and spotted Mikey fast asleep with his car running, and reported it to the rest of the crew, who ran outside to save him.
Mikey wasn’t allowed to handle dry ice again after that.
In our new kitchen we were assigned a liaison from the US Department of Agriculture, whom I came to know as USDA Eddy. He made sure that everyone on the floor wore hairnets and outer jackets to neutralize the inevitability of someone wearing a shirt to work that was covered in cat hair. And unlike in my previous operation, we were then required to have a formalized sanitization process, along with specific kill procedures for when we had to dispose of waste. And we also had to have what’s called a HACCP (hazard analysis critical control points) system, which is a fancy way of calling a very detailed-and-documented process for handling every single piece of food: the temperature it gets cooked to, the temperature it gets chilled to, the temperature it gets packed at, how long it sits on the cooling rack, at what time it is vacuum-sealed and by whom, and so on.
USDA Eddy explained to us that we had to document every single step of the process for every single action surrounding every piece of food that passed through our kitchen. If someone had to cover his mouth to sneeze, and then had to run to the nearest sink to wash his hands, it was documented. If a tray of chicken breasts was overcooked and had to be disposed of, it was documented. If the guys locked Li’l Mikey in the freezer room for five minutes one morning and another five that afternoon, it was documented.
You might think that documenting every minute detail of daily operations would help keep food companies honest, but you’d be sorely mistaken. This actually allows, if not outright encourages, food manufacturers to bend the rules, because the USDA didn’t actually monitor our real-time operations. Instead, every single thing we did was monitored in retrospect. The only way the USDA knew that we cooked each chicken breast to one hundred sixty-five degrees to ensure against salmonella was that we said that we did it in our activity log. The only way the USDA knew employees were washing their hands after leaving the bathroom was that we documented it in the activity log. The only way the USDA knew that the food that ended up in our customers’ mouths was compliant with all the health and safety guidelines was by checking our activity log. For Chrissake! This was more of an invitation for fuckery than when my third-grade teacher let my best friend Adam and me swap papers and grade each other’s quizzes.
Having USDA Eddy on-site also meant that we were now required to use “accurate” food labels to list our meals’ ingredients; however, this process was highly informal and riddled with all sorts of loopholes, many of which USDA Eddy taught me.
Eddy was on my right, sorting through our food labels, and Brie—who had recently quit her sales job to become my full-time business partner—was on my left, taking notes with a pen and pad, as we walked through the kitchen.
“What’s this ‘paleo’ word here mean?” Eddy asked when reviewing my packaging for approval.
“Oh, that. It’s just a trending buzzword at the moment. It supposedly means this is the type of food people ate during the Paleolithic era.”
“Hmm, well, I can’t approve that.”
“Oh,” I said deflated. “I guess we can take it off the label, but that’s going to hurt our sales with the CrossFit gyms.”
“Well, hang on there, Mr. Philips; you don’t have to go taking it off the label. Let me show ya a little trick: if you slap the word ‘friendly’ after the word ‘paleo,’ that’ll make it OK.”
He was teaching me that compound words were somehow above the law, like when he rejected our buffalo chicken meal because it wasn’t from Buffalo, New York (seriously, that was his reason), but allowed us to call it “buffalo-style chicken.” I wasn’t sure whether there were actual rules about this stuff or ol’ Eddy just had strange lexicon pet peeves that he liked to enforce.
“OK.” I sifted through the labels, leaning on Brie’s pad to scribble “friendly” on each one, then handed them back to Eddy. “Here you go.”
“Hold it there.” He handed the majority of them back to me. “I only need to see the chicken and beef labels.”
“What about all these others: pizzas, breakfasts, desserts, seafood, veggies?”
“Nope. That stuff’s out of my jurisdiction.”
“Who inspects those, then?”
“Well, everything other than beef and chicken technically falls under FDA jurisdiction, but nobody’s going to inspect those while I’m here, so they’re good to go.”
“So, you’re saying I can call the carb-free pizza ‘paleo’ without adding the word ‘friendly?’ ”
“You can claim your peanut butter brownie contains no peanuts, for all I care. I just cover the birds and cows, brother.”
“You’re messin’ with me . . . ”
“No, sir. Do what you please with the rest of the labels.”
“Oh, so, then you’ll only need to check our nutrition facts math for the beef and chicken meals too, right?”
“Me? Do math?” He laughed. “That’ll be the day! Just get your dietitian to put some numbers together, I’ll give ’em a once-over, and then you’ll be good to go.”
“You don’t oversee the process?”
“Nah. As long as you use a registered dietitian, that’s good enough for me. We mainly care about the ingredients list.”
Brie and I returned to the kitchen a few days later with the nutrition facts from our dietitian—who, by the way, was an RD (registered dietician)—though Eddy never inquired about her credentials.
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” He sorted through the labels. “This one’s good. This one’s fine. Hold it! There’s no way these serving sizes are accurate.” He passed me a label for our meal.
“Really? Hmm. OK, well, I can get her to recheck the math on them if need be.”
“Now, before you go wasting all that time reworking what’s on the labels, why don’t you just change your company’s category to weight loss on your business license. It’ll be a onetime fix, so we don’t have to have this conversation again.”
“I don’t understand. What does that do?”
“See, if you list yourself as a weight-loss company like Weight Watchers, instead of a food company like Heinz, you aren’t required to list accurate portion sizes on your meals. You can make a portion whatever the hell size you want.”
“Are you serious? How is that even allowed?” I asked Eddy. Brie had slightly scrunched lips and was shaking her head in disbelief.
“Oh, it’s another political loophole; some Republican probably got paid off by one of your competitors.”
I couldn’t believe my ears! As a nutritionist, I’d spent years teaching people how to decipher food labels and the importance of the nutrition facts numbers, portion sizes, number of servings, etc., and this government agent standing in front of me—the guy who was supposed to be keeping me in check—was telling me he didn’t give a shit? Not only that, but he was teaching me—hell, encouraging me—to lie on my labels.
Practically, the only thing Eddy couldn’t advise me on was the marketing claims I was allowed to make when advertising our meals. I figured taking out a full-page ad saying, “Our food cures cancer!” would be pushing our luck—though I’d found a plethora of research suggesting that it might be true—but was I at least allowed to say, “Our food helps reverse type 2 diabetes?” USDA Eddy had no clue, nor did his boss, nor his boss’s boss. Nobody from the Department of Agriculture could give me a straight answer regarding what I could legally say about my food. “If you’re that concerned about your marketing claims,” Eddy eventually suggested, “I would just get the FDA on the phone and ask them.”
—
“Food and Drug Administration.” The woman’s voice sounded annoyed. “This is so-and-so. How can I help you?”
“Hello, yes, I’m trying to find out what sort of claims my company can make about our healthy meals.”
“That’s really not what we do here. You’ll want to call the FTC to get approval on any product claims.”
“OK, do you have a number I can—Hello?”
“Federal Trade Commission.” This woman sounded equally annoyed. “This is so-and-so speaking. How may I direct your call?”
“Yes, I was told to call you guys to find out what claims I’m able to make about my health-food products. For example, can we claim that they’re helpful in reversing type 2 diabetes?”
“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll need to contact the CPSC to find that out.”
“You’re joking. I was just told to call you—that the FTC handles food product claims.”
“Yes, sir, but you’re asking about consumer product safety claims, not actual food claims.”
“OK, but I—”
Click.
“Thank you for calling the Consumer Product Safety Commission. So-and-so speaking. How can I help you?”
“Yeah, I’m just trying to find out what health claims I can advertise about my company’s products. I just got off the phone with the FTC and they told me to call you guys to find the answer I’m looking for.”
“I’d be happy to assist you. What kind of claims are you trying to make about your products, sir?”
“I want to know, for example, whether I can label my meals gluten-free.”
“Oh, it’s a food product?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll need to speak with the FDA, sir.”
“Yeah, but I already—”
“Would you like me to transfer you?”
“Oh! Sure, that would be great! Thank you.”
“One moment.”
“Hello?”
“He-llooo?”
Click.
God damn it!
“Food and Drug Administration.” I recognized the irritable voice. “This is so-and-so. How can I help you?”
“Look, we spoke just a few minutes ago. I’m trying to find out what kinds of health claims I can make about my food products. You sent me to the FTC, they sent me to the CPSC, and they directed me back to you guys. Can you please help me out, please?! I just want to make sure we’re up to code and not breaking any laws or anything.”
“I can help you, sir, no problem.”
“Oh, thank God!”
“Has your kitchen been inspected?”
“Uh, yeah, what do you need to know?”
“What’s your facility’s FDA code number?”
“Oh, no, we’re actually a USDA-inspected kitchen.”
“I see. Well, I’m sorry sir, but in that case, you’ll have to check with your United States Department of Agriculture representative to find out what claims you’re able to make about your products.”
“I already checked with them and they said they don’t handle that; the FDA does.”
“We do, sir, but only for FDA-inspected kitchens.”
“Well, do you want to send someone out to inspect my kitchen?”
“Sir, if you’re already working with the USDA, then you’re outside of our jurisdiction.”
“But you don’t know that I’m under USDA jurisdiction. We’re just talking on the phone here.”
“Well, are you?”
“Yes.”
“OK, then, sir. The only way the FDA will have any interest in visiting your USDA facility is if consumers start contacting us to complain that your meals are making them sick.”
“Are you—are you serious?”
“That’s correct, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“No, but we haven’t solved anyth—”
“Thank you, have a nice day.”
Click.
I wasn’t mad that they weren’t helping me, or even that they kept hanging up on me. I was mad at the forethought of us making claims about our food, and then, years later, some asshole from one of these very agencies I’d just called stepping in and busting me for breaking some law that they wouldn’t even tell me existed. I needed a drink.
It was just after lunch and I was already sick of drinking wine that day. I had fifteen minutes before that day’s conference call—just enough time to zip around the corner and pick up a bottle of Stoli from the ABC store. Red Bull would make up for the caffeine I was used to getting from the coffee. I won’t go overboard. I laid the ground rule. Just enough to calm my nerves, so I can get through this call.
“Fuck it,” I told everyone on the videoconference, “I can’t get a straight answer from anyone about health claims, so let’s move on.” Brie was sitting just off camera beside me, half listening as she rapidly typed away at whatever she was working on, on her laptop.
“OK,” Jason spoke up, “the next thing on my list is ingredients.”
“What about the ingredients? We’ve got them down to a point.”
“When I went through the list, I saw a lot of unnecessary amenities we can cut back on—for example, almond meal is about three times the price of starch, and that special oatmeal you use for the tuna cakes can easily be replaced by regular oatmeal, if not bread crumbs.”
“Yeah, but we use those things for the gluten-free line.”
“Nonsense,” Jason said matter-of-factly, “we’ll swap them out. Also, all these various herbs and spices that we use for seasoning are superfluous—salt can be used uniformly, which would save a ton. And I noticed we’re using Stevia as a sweetener in the dessert items. Sucralose is much cheaper.”
“Isn’t sucralose bad for you?” Jill chimed in.
“I don’t know that it’s any worse than Stevia,” I said, “but, yeah, sucralose is certainly much more stigmatized in the media, and so if people see it on the label, they’ll freak. Same for the gluten stuff.”
“Well,” Jason said, “there’s your answer: just don’t list it on the label.”
Brie’s thunderous typing came to a dead halt. There was an awkwardly long pause. After a minute, the white noise in the background seemed to have gotten so loud, it was hurting my ears.
I broke the silence. “You mean, like . . . use it, but . . . omit it?”
“You said it yourself,” Jason confirmed. “You don’t know that it’s any worse than the other sweetener, so what does it matter which one is listed on the label?”
I looked over at Brie, who was shaking her head at me while sternly mouthing the word “no.”
“I—I don’t know, man . . . ” I hesitantly said to Jason.
“OK, everybody,” Jason said, “let’s go ahead and wrap up this call. We’ll go through the rest of the list on tomorrow’s call.”
With that, everyone said good-bye and hung up. Then my phone rang. It was Jason.
I answered, “What’s up, man?”
“Listen, Philips, when we make decisions on these calls, we need you to own them. It looks bad when you sound uncertain—like you’re not on board with us. We need to know you’re a team player.”
I mixed another vodka bomb before Brie grabbed the bottle from me. “But we hadn’t made a decision yet,” I said. “We were in the middle of talking it out.”
“You’re the food and nutrition guy, right? When you make a decision about that stuff, I back you on it. My job is running the numbers, so when I say we need to make a change for the sake of the P&L sheet, I need you to support me.”
“Fair enough, but you’re encroaching on my territory—you’re talking about changing the ingredients.”
“Philips,” he said in a stern tone I’d never heard before, “this is just a simple, insignificant change to the ingredients, but it’ll make a huge difference to the bottom line.” Then he quickly changed back to a lighthearted tone. “We’re partners now. Don’t you want our company to do well?”
“Of course I want our company to do well.” I rolled my eyes for Brie to see.
“OK, then. Why don’t you go ahead and email everyone at the kitchen and tell them to make the switch, buddy? And copy Aaron and everyone in on it, so they know you’re on board with the team.”
“Maybe you should be the one to tell everyone; it’s your decision, Jason.”
“You’re the boss, Philips. Orders need to come down from you.” He then, once again, switched to a faux-bro tone. “Take charge, brother. Own that shit!”
“All right,” I said.
Brie stood up and turned to leave. I tried grabbing her arm, but she pulled away and shut the office door behind her.
“I can do that for the seafood and stuff,” I continued on with Jason, “but USDA Eddy’s going to shoot down the chicken and beef labels in a heartbeat.”
“You’re a resourceful guy; I trust you’ll find a way to make it happen.”
That irked me. Yet, even though I knew he was making an unethical decision that would have a negative impact on our customers, I emailed the group and told them about the changes.
After a couple of weeks of trying to sneak various versions of the nutrition labels by ol’ USDA Eddy, Jason called to check on my progress.
“How are those labels coming along?” he asked. “They done yet?”
“No, he keeps rejecting them. The new, cheaper ingredients are listed in the operations manual for the chefs to go by, so he knows they’re supposed to be on the nutrition label.”
“Philips,” he said as he switched to the stern tone, “we need to find a solution quick, OK, buddy?”
“I don’t know what we can do. I can’t take it out of the manual—the chefs work like robots and they’ll fuck up the recipes without them listed in there.”
“Well, I trust you’ll make it happen.”
For the previous few years, I’d been giving money to the Miss Virginia organization, partially as a favor, and partially because having these young attractive women promoting my meals was a great advertisement. So I called the current Miss Virginia, who had just returned from competing at the Miss America pageant and, because she hadn’t won, had a little time to spare for a friend. I dropped her off at the kitchen for a few hours, wearing a short black skirt, where she was to spend the afternoon with USDA Eddy, making flirty small talk, asking personal questions, and tugging on his arm as she said she was dying to try the new meals as soon as he approved them.
When I checked in with Eddy the following morning, our inaccurate labels had miraculously been approved. This earned me an “attaboy” from Jason.
So, big deal, I told myself, our customers think they’re eating Stevia, but it’s actually Splenda; one processing plant’s ingredient versus another. I was able to convince myself after my second Yellow Tail of the morning. But gluten was different.
“We can’t just omit it from the label,” I assured Jason. “People can get sick from that shit, you know?”
“Can I trust you’ll find a solution to that?”
“Jason!” I said, annoyed. “There’s no solution to find. We have to stop advertising that we’ve got gluten-free food.”
“Philips, that’s not an option.”
“Well, then you need to find a solution!”
“I don’t want to get into an argument with you, buddy. Why don’t you just do some research and see what you can come up with.”
After a few vodka bombs and a handful of phone calls, I’d found a solution.
I’d still been talking with Papa John’s executive chef sporadically, so I’d been keeping a close eye on its business. When Papa John’s announced its new gluten-free pies, I convinced my celiac friend and her husband to try one. When she told the Papa John’s employee on the phone that she’d been diagnosed with celiac disease, he recommended against her eating its gluten-free pizza because it “couldn’t guarantee against cross contamination.”
I checked out Pizza Hut to see whether it was any better and it was just as blatant. Right on its website it said that the sauce—made by Hershey’s—used on its gluten-free pizza could contain gluten. So the pizza companies were shouting “We’ve got gluten-free pizza!” to reel customers in, but when someone with an actual gluten allergy asked whether it was safe to eat it, the pizza places would tell them, “We recommend against it.”
I borrowed their strategy and built a safety net into our customer service scripts to prevent true celiacs from ordering, which incidentally produced a funny little case study on hypochondriacs. Any time someone tried to place an order and asked whether the food was gluten-free—and they frequently did—customer service was trained to respond by saying, “Yes it is, but we can’t guarantee against cross-contamination, so I don’t recommend you order any food.” And can you guess what response this evoked? Out of the tens of thousands of customer inquiries we documented as claiming a gluten allergy, every single person—with the exception of one or two—said, “You know what? I’m sure I’ll be fine. I’d like to place an order anyway.” This made me feel a little better about our misleading labels, because it confirmed what I’d assumed since 2009, that 99.9 percent of people who thought they had a gluten sensitivity either didn’t have one or it didn’t bother them enough to stop ordering the food.
I wasn’t proud of what I’d done, but I justified it by thinking to myself, this is the last shady thing and from here on I’ll play it straight, which, of course, wasn’t true. Nothing we did was ever enough to quench Jason’s thirst for revenue. Every other week, it was something—cutting a minuscule cost here, tacking on a hidden fee there. One trick Jason enforced was the “one dollar” technique: Every so often, we added just one dollar to a price—bumping from $147.99 to $148.99, for example. The customer wouldn’t even notice, but multiply that one dollar by, say, twenty thousand people, and that’s an additional twenty grand.
It was all about the bottom line.