They got the soda, and they got Duhé. On weekends, he showed up at supermarkets, handing out sample cups and filling up helium balloons that said Cajun Cola. Inevitably, some would float to the ceiling, providing free advertising until they drifted down.
Duhé, too, had left the ground. "It was an incredible rush," he says. "I had conquered the odds. Inventors aren't supposed to make it." In May Cajun Cola showed up at the annual "Taste of the South" party in Washington, D.C., and Duhé even managed to get it delivered to a breakfast Barbara Bush was hosting. "I couldn't get a vendor in Washington, and he's practically serving Cajun Cola in the White House," marvels Canfield. "He was everywhere."
Even, for pete's sake, The Wall Street Journal. On June 16, 1988, Cajun Cola earned a sentence on page one. With that, the wire services went berserk. Within a week, Duhé appeared in countless newspapers and on TV. And -- oh, yeah -- Duhé sent a six-pack to Inc. magazine. "The writer there told me it was great stuff," he recalls. "That praise was burned into my brain."
His visibility seemed to be paying off. In the first month, Shreveport Budweiser expected to sell no more than 2,000 cases of Cajun Cola. Instead, it sold 3,627. Retailers, of course, had yet to grant Cajun Cola precious shelf space. For the most part, they were selling it in off-shelf displays, at a promotional price of $1.99 per six-pack. The recommended retail price was $2.69, permitting them a comfortable margin of 23%. As they dismantled displays and raised the price, retailers expected demand to settle -- a bit. "We said, 'Let's see what it's going to flatten out at,' " recalls Brooks of Shreveport Bud. Instead, "It just kept dying." In May they sold 994 cases. In June a new round of promotions bumped sales up to 1,569 cases. After that sales tumbled down to 405 cases in July. Cajun Cola was going flat.
Armed with a leather scrapbook of press clips -- which he tended to pull out too often for most people's tastes -- Duhé believed "I could look at it and fix it," he says. He kept instructing Canfield to turn the spice level down. Furthermore, he decided, he needed some advertising. He had plenty of new friends in the business. "All the ad agencies wanted to get a chunk of money out of him," recalls Elinor Stephens, general manager of KTUX-99, a top-40 radio station in Shreveport. At the same time a chance elevator meeting had brought Duhé a chunk of money. Glen Graves, a Shreveport realtor and financial consultant, had actually known Duhé for years; in fact, Duhé had been married to his minister's daughter. Hearing of Duhé's woeful undercapitalization, Graves, who liked Cajun Cola, kicked in $15,000. "Some thought Duhé was a young genius," he says.
Few knew how lonely he was. At the height of his success, Duhé had only his six-year-old son, Shawn, with whom to share it. "It was hard to reach the mountaintop and not have someone there with me," he says. It was just Rick Duhé and Cajun Cola. And, as the product began to falter, he wrapped himself ever more tightly around it. He even took to calling it Rick Duhé's Cajun Cola.
No matter the growing evidence, he wasn't about to retreat. A distributor in Alexandria, La., tried it out, with no luck. Another tested it in Monroe, La., registering poor sales. Through a cousin of the owner of Shreveport Bud, Duhé even managed to send some trailer loads down to Daytona Beach, Fla., a failed experiment.
Things were turning ugly. Unable to admit defeat, Duhé felt he had no choice but to act as if Cajun Cola was taking over the world. The longer he could keep it going, the more likely an investor would come along and save him. Especially when talking with reporters, Duhé treated every feeler -- from fast-food chains or liquor companies or catalogs -- as if it was on the verge of becoming reality.
It wasn't over, Duhé told himself. Don't let it be over.
But as sales trickled down to 50 cases a month, he grew desperate. In October he drove 23 hours each way to meet with a food distributor in Toronto. Finally, in November, he loaded a trailer with furniture and a pick-up truck with Cajun Cola and headed to New Orleans. Maybe tourists would go for it. "I figured, 'If you're going broke in Shreveport, why not go broke in New Orleans?' " he says.
No matter where he went, Duhé, a business novice, was coming toe-to-toe with one of commerce's harshest lessons. For a brief time he had managed to patch together a coalition, a group of people united by their true interest in Cajun Cola. Some had dropped out, but a core group stood by him. He called them his "friends." Sure, they liked him. But they had their own reasons for being involved: Canfield wanted to produce the concentrate, Eisenberg wanted national exposure, and Bozell wanted a lucrative rollout. When it looked like none of them would get what they came for, they turned on Duhé. "I felt deserted," he says.
Media inspired and media driven, Cajun Cola had always found an ally in the press. Then, on November 14, 1988, the media disembarked from the Cajun Cola bandwagon. "Weak Local Sales Send Spicy Cajun Cola South," read the Shreveport Journal. Duhé, feeling betrayed, vowed that "if I could have gotten away with hurting the reporter physically, I would have."
Get to New Orleans. Find a distributor. Show them all.
Six months after appearing on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, Rick Duhé moved into a small spare bedroom at his aunt and uncle's house in a New Orleans suburb. One night, lying awake on his twin bed, he calculated that he was $100,000 in debt, not counting his own salary. The next morning he loaded his car with Cajun Cola and set off to find somebody who might be interested in carrying it. Riverfront restaurants, independent grocers, T-shirt shops. Some days, he'd sell it at a loss because he needed pocket cash.
Every once in a while, one of his creditors would track him down. They didn't want to hear about the next big deal -- "There was always a deal that was going to happen next week," says Eisenberg -- or the new potential investor. They wanted their money. "People that seem warm and fuzzy at one time stop being that when you can't pay them," Duhé observes. "When your company is going downhill, and you can't tell people when you'll be able to pay them, what kind of dialogue can you have?" Betrayed and isolated, Duhé was feeling lonelier than ever. By March 1989 Duhé had sold his inventory of Cajun Cola and wasn't in any position to buy more from Canfield. "I just wanted my sanity back," he says. "I wanted a normal life again." No more meetings. No more interviews. No more hope.
