For years, potato manufacturers have been looking for ways to keep their product intact. Finally someone stopped fighting and embraced the fail. Fail Chips are potatoes that are already broken. And that’s great!
A lot of time and money are spent on research to prevent chips from breaking inside packets. This is why packs are full of air to prevent the chips from colliding with each other and breaking.
“I would like to inform that the pack of air you sell is coming with some potato chips inside…”
And why not accept failure and simply sell broken chips? Someone thought about it and so the Fail Chips came up. Its package is made to be opened at one end, to pour directly into the mouth and to eat without getting your hands dirty.
No, it is not about these fail chips I am talking!
Fail Chips é apenas uma ação publicitária, mas o conceito é inovador. A empresa por trás das batatas é a Mail Chimp, isso mesmo, o serviço de e-mail marketing (se você assina a newsletter Eat Innovation, já recebeu meus e-mails através da Mail Chimp e se não assinou, está esperando o que? Assine agora aqui e receba o que tem de mais bacana em inovação de alimentos, sem enrolação, só conteúdo de verdade!).
Fail Chips is just an advertising action, but the concept is innovative. The company behind the potatoes is Mail Chimp, that’s right, the email marketing service (if you subscribe to the Eat Innovation newsletter, you’ve already received my emails through Mail Chimp. Unfortunately this is only available for portuguese speakers because I am not able to translate and manage a separate list yet, but if you really wish to have that, please write me an e-mail!).
They made a joke with the wrong names that people say when trying to speak their name (Kale Limp, Fail Chips, Mail Shrimp, among others you can see here) and from there they created the product.
The potatoes are really on the market, for a limited time, unfortunately only in the United States. The fact is that the product served the purpose of drawing public attention to the company.
Aside from the marketing campaign and despite the ease of copying the idea (after all anyone can buy potatoes and break them before eating), this is an interesting case of innovation. It has a philosophical footprint of being a product that was born of failure. How many innovations were born from the mistake? How many times have we despaired because an experiment “went wrong”? The discovery of penicillin is one of the most famous examples, but there are many others. In Brazil, Nestlé sells cracked Negresco biscuits (similar to the American Oreo crumbs), ideal for use in milkshakes and desserts. So far on the blog we talked about the ugly vegetables, which were rejected and turned into real products (remember here).
Negresco e Oreo crumbs
Can you imagine how many broken biscuits stopped going into the trash to turn product? Still talking about innovation management, Fail Chips solve a customer pain that are dirty hands of potatoes or even dirty hands in the street and have no where to wash hands to eat the potatoes. It also meets industry pain, which would no longer need to fill the air packs to keep the potatoes intact. And finally, it still creates a desire, because according to them the super-tempered pieces that are at the bottom of the package are now the whole package, that is, it is an entire package of the best part. The idea is so simple that we wonder : How come I did not think of this before?
Yeah, it’s a campaign, but it could be a line product. What other products do you know that were born from fail?
References: Oddity Central, Food Beast, Washington Post
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