What Happened to Talenti?
nytimes.com
What Happened to Talenti?
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#2A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capitalizing on the good name of the company until they wear it down completely.
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#3Same thing that happened to every other brand on earth: product quality was sacrificed to serve profit. Even the seemingly well-meaning Ben and Jerry's fell.
Anyone who has read schumpeter could predict this. It's disappointing how few people in the forums of the capital of VC recognize this: production methods should be nationalized at the point of enshittification or you end up in the current shithole.
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#4Oh yeah, my partner and I noticed this when our local grocery store had a sale on Talenti. It just... wasn't very good. Like it was just OK. For that grocery store, Nancy's Fancy is next to Talenti and - for a couple bucks more - you get something that is absolutely delicious.
I'm not associated with Nancy's Fancy but I will absolutely shill for it. Wonderful stuff.
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#5A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is. https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capit…
- Launch amazing brand with tight/negative margins to drive heavy consumer adoption
- Sell brand to megacorp/PE for hundreds of millions or billions.
- Brand gets "optimized for cost" so buyer gets an ROI.
- By the time the public has soured on the brand, the buyout has paid for itself plus profit.
The solution would be to launch these products with high margin built in, but then everybody scoffs at the cost and you die in the womb.
The unicorn solution is that you actually invent a way of producing the high value thing for very cheap, cheaper than everybody else, so you can compete on price while still having top-shelf inputs. But man, that problem is about 5 orders of magnitude more difficult to solve than simply coming up with a product people will like.
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#6A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is. https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capit…
And you must ask yourself, is the ability to sell your company to another company a benefit or should there be considerably stronger hurdles for this kind of thing?
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#7Putting 2 servings of ice cream in a thick plastic jar was always a dumb gimmick.
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#8Looks like classic enshittification to me. It doesn't only apply to software and services.
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#9Agreed that this happens to a lot of specialty products, but for some reason Ice Cream (or in this case gelato) always seems to go through this cycle. Its like a 10 year cycle from introduction to popularity to selling out and going with cheaper ingredients and before you know it the brand is tarnished and some other brand has taken the mantle.
Re: What Happened to Talenti?
#10A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is. https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capit…
fwiw, as a giant list might be ok, but writing is ai edited