A picture is worth a thousand calories.
It seems every time I find myself in a quickie gas n’ sip convenience store these days, there’s some new bizarre candy flavor mashup.
The next time I get to the store, it’s gone, only to be replace by a flavor you might dream up in a sugar-low acid trip (the white chocolate candy corn M&Ms come to mind).
Seasonal foods are the perfect chance to “beta test” new flavors and new foods. After all, if no one likes them it’s OK — they were limited time anyway! This approach is a lot like the way people develop tech products these days, following Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology:
- You make a “minimum viable” product to test a hypothesis. That means a product that is enough that people will try, use and / or buy it, without any extra bells and whistles.
- You measure results, adjust, try again and gradually add features.
If people love your limited flavors, you can decide whether to create pent up demand and keep them limited. Or launch them as a year long flavor or product. Even old timer See’s Candies is doing this now, with limited flavors that, for a while, they were calling “beta.”
The important thing is to fail fast…as the pumpkin spice latte M&Ms may very well do.
Check out these finds…have you tried them? I just couldn’t.
