Credit: the author went shopping |
Charles Sanna died
recently at 101
years old. His family’s company, Sanna Dairy Engineers (sold to
Beatrice Foods in 1967 and now a part of Conagra), delivered powered coffee
creamer to the U.S. Army during the Korean War.
Fearful of missing deliveries to the military, Sanna Dairy
regularly overproduced, leaving the company with a perishable product destined
for disposal.
Sanna took to the family kitchen in Wisconsin. By
combining water, cocoa, and the excess powdered creamer, he created what would
become the Swiss Miss brand of instant hot cocoa. It was a novel
combination, a stroke of genius, and a windfall for Sanna’s company.
Constraint is often described as a key to innovation.
Not having enough of something can lead to all sorts of interesting
ideas. In the case of Charles Sanna, however, his motivation was
excess.
In The
Visible Hand (293-294), Alfred Chandler, Jr. tells the story of
Henry Parsons Crowell (1855-1944), who, in 1882, constructed the first mill to
grade, clean, hull, cut, package, and ship oatmeal under one roof. It was
a model of continuous-process with output so great that Crowell’s plant
overwhelmed the traditional bulk market for oatmeal. The result was
excess—and the creation of Quaker Oats Cereal.
Credit: the author in the cereal aisle |
Crowell used branding and promotion to turn a grain that
some believed was better fed to horses into a popular breakfast cereal for
America’s emerging mass market.
I have a business school classmate, George Maliekel, who
once said (and profoundly, I think) that “inventory is the price a company pays
for lack of information.” (see Richard Tedlow’s New
and Improved, xix)
If you subscribe to the genius of Henry
Crowell and the late Charles Sanna, however, too much of a good thing is
another of the rudiments of innovation and can be a hidden source of brilliant
new ideas.
Somehow you make reading about instant hot cocoa worth my time. How can you not love a person who refuses to through out a good batch of instant coffee creamer?
ReplyDelete