Though she had just one employee, Jackson relied on professional help at every stage of the process -- from developing the product to designing the art on the packaging to working out the distribution. Most of her staff work came from friends, colleagues, and interested strangers. She called on the skills of marketing and packaging experts still at Beatrice; she interviewed people she knew at Kraft Inc. and other food companies; she called specialists she'd met at trade shows.
The difference between the help she got at MOM and the help she would have gotten as a big-company manager is that this help was mostly free. Package design ran about $37,000; product-development costs, about $60,000; office expenses and travel, another $40,000; and her assistant's salary (Jackson isn't collecting one yet), about $30,000. The total: roughly $137,000. Some of the friends who helped were compensated, but not in cash. One Jackson named an (unpaid and temporary) vice-president of MOM to dress up the woman's resume and enhance her hirability. For another she used her corporate connections to find him a job when he got the Beatrice sack. People help, Jackson says, because they're flattered to be asked, intrigued by the project, or just interested to see how you're doing. "I ask. If people say no, it's no.'
The difference between the help she got at MOM and the help a lot of other entrepreneurs never get is that she did ask. She knew enough to know what she didn't know and understood that she didn't have to be embarrassed to admit it. She had the self-confidence to believe that she could sort the good advice from the bad and to understand that someone else could have an idea worth pursuing or a technique worth trying. She covered the secrecy issue with nondisclosure forms. "Everyone I talked to signed one," she says, "or I didn't talk to them. Just one person refused.'
To begin, Jackson tested the concept: were parents interested in quick-to-fix meals specially formulated to children's taste and nutrition needs? She distributed a survey, drafted with the help of a fellow outplacement inmate, through a diaper service (cheaper than a mailing) to 2,000 Chicago-area families. Fifteen percent responded, overwhelmingly in the affirmative, and told her a great deal about what the product should be. Another outplacement colleague used a computer to tabulate the results, which showed, among other things, that parents favored turkey and chicken (94%) over beef (74%) and opposed MSG (91%) and hot dogs (61%). Most said that they wouldn't buy the product by mail order. Many said it seemed somehow uncaring. The survey results told her that if she could develop an easily prepared, complete, and balanced meal without additives and preservatives and sell it for less than $3, a substantial number of consumers would indeed be interested. The concept, she concluded, was sound.
But what about the size of the market for such a product? Who was the market? Jackson wasn't going to launch a business based on assumption, guess, or gut. She bought some survey data, scrounged trend data from a friend, and consulted the Census data in the public library. Then she used a sophisticated volume-projection model suggested by a former colleague at Beatrice. She eliminated the 45% of U.S. families earning less than $20,000 annually. They won't pay extra for a child's meal. Another 5.5% (in her survey) said they wouldn't. She eliminated them, too. By her calculation, then, if she sold the product at $2.30 per unit, well within the top price that willing buyers said they would spend, and if those buyers serve it 3.6 times per month, as they indicated, to their 1.8 children, the potential annual retail market works out to roughly $500 million. That, she decided, was worth going after -- not because she necessarily liked the market or had always wanted to produce a kids' product or for any other transcendental reason -- but just because she had demonstrated to her own satisfaction that it was big enough.
The next step was product development. From her survey she had learned a good deal about what parents wanted and didn't want their kids to eat. Within those constraints, she needed test formulations she could try out with the kids themselves.
Her contract with Food Innovisions Inc., in Harahan, La., required Jackson to give the company 25 product ideas. Food Innovision would work up formulations, which, after focus-group tasting sessions run by Jackson, would be cut to 7, and, after more focus group tests, to 5. Some of the final 5 required 15 reformulations, Jackson says, before kids and their moms scored them high enough. Then there were more focus groups, and more adjustments, as Food Innovisions scaled up the batch size to 400 pounds.
Most food entrepreneurs develop their own products. Debbi Fields did -- from cookie recipes that she'd been using at home for years. But Jackson leans more toward Betty Crocker. Most nights at her house in suburban Deerfield the family eats take-out: Chinese on Thursdays, store-broiled chicken on Wednesdays. On Tuesday nights husband Joe does spaghetti. Jackson limits her cooking to weekends, and to preparing homemade baby food for Joey, born last September.
The sort of entrepreneur who pays someone else to develop her food product is one who knows herself and knows that she'll get a better product, faster, that way. Besides bringing more proficient cooks than she into the process, contracting out allows her to be a critical judge of the results. She doesn't "own" the product until she's bought it, and she doesn't pay for it until it's right. When So-Pak-Co Inc., Jackson's contract manufacturer in Mullins, S.C., cooked up the first production-size, 600-pound batch of meals from Food Innovision's recipes, Jackson could pronounce it "terrible" without embarrassing herself. Getting the scaled-up meals exactly right by Jackson's standards took three weeks.
Jackson also employed her corporate experience to do something that lots of entrepreneurs, in the excitement of a start-up, neglect: she priced her product to generate a profit -- from the beginning. The process was simple, although getting the numbers she needed wasn't always easy. She knew from her market research that $3 per meal was the upper limit, that any price above that would cost her too much in volume. She meticulously estimated her own costs. Her contract manufacturer had given her a price. From this information she could compute her margins at various price points less than the $3 cap. When they turned out to be too low, she went back to the manufacturer and negotiated a better deal. The pennies may not work out precisely as she projected once sales get under way, but, given her preparation, Jackson will know exactly which cost is over and where there is slack, if any. The manufacturer wanted no contract. Jackson insisted on one, and not on the back of an envelope.
