Hi. I'm Paul Nixon, a designer living in Mountain View California. My days (and some nights) are spent designing websites for a little company in Cupertino. The rest of my time is spent with my beautiful wife and friends, road cycing and reading your blogs.

Gardenburger vs. Big Business Burgers

Monday, February 9, 2004 11: 54 PM

Having soy protein burgers for dinner? Here's a recommendation: Buy Gardenburger not Boca Burgers. Gardenburger is a classy, well branded underdog who is focused on making one family of products really well, while Boca is the product of that really big company, Philip Morris/Kraft, who makes a seamingly endless list of products with a bottomless marketing budget. A few other details:

  • $50 million/year in revenues (Gardenburger) vs. $30 billion/year in revenues (Kraft).
  • 1 factory supporting 180+ employees (Gardenburger) vs. Many, many factories and 109,000 employees (Kraft).
  • A great story of a chef and a restaurant in Oregon growing into 20 years of innovation in making a family of products great (Gardenburger) vs. A bunch of VPs sitting around a table selecting the next market they can penetrate and overwhelm with their size and distribution channels. From there, they map out in cold PowerPoint driven meetings how they will cut prices, own "x" percentage of market share and ultimately take out the little guy - who really put their heart and soul into helping define the space (Kraft).
My mind is made up. I'm sick of this Wal-Mart, "own every market mentality" of these "conglorporations". Putting my mouth and money on Gardenburger.

Oh, and Gardenburger, just to stay competitive, had to relocate a few months ago out of Portland to somewhere in Utah in order to control costs...as Gardenburger CEO Scott Wallace put it:

"All of us at Gardenburger will always consider Portland, Oregon our home. However, this action will lower operating costs and improve efficiencies going forward. As the market for meatless products has become increasingly competitive, it is essential that we redouble our efforts to improve our ability to compete."