Baked Cat Food, Toaster Fries Finally Find a Niche in Museum of Failed Products

A cold-water wash for woolens with built-in moth repellent seemed like a good idea to Robert McMath, but the product ended up on a shelf next to the biggest marketing blunders of recent times.

Powdered instant yogurt, cans of pink aerosol Silly String and baked cat food are among the failed products McMath proudly displays in a showroom off his office.

McMath, a former Colgate Palmolive executive who now runs a marketing research company, is the person scores of large and small manufacturing companies turn to before investing in products like cucumber hair conditioner, designer diapers or adult food packaged in baby food jars.

“It’s an opportunity for manufacturers to see what has gone on in the past, to not make the same mistake, to not remake the wheel,” said McMath, who founded Marketing Intelligence Service Ltd. in 1968.

The bread and butter of McMath’s company is putting out weekly and twice-monthly publications listing new consumable products in U.S. and foreign markets.

Clients, mostly advertising agencies and manufacturing companies, can also contract with McMath to send along samples of hard-to-find items.

8 of 10 Fail

Because only two out of every 10 new products survives in the U.S. marketplace, scores of new items make it onto the failed product shelves in McMath’s office. In Japan, only two in 100 items survive.

McMath, 56, established the company in the Finger Lakes grape-growing village of Naples and was sole owner before selling to a group of partners in New York City nearly four years ago.

He is still president of the firm but now has more time for his favorite hobby: shopping.

Seeing McMath at the supermarket is like watching a sweepstakes winner trying to cram as many freebies into a shopping cart before the clock runs down.

But McMath isn’t getting his cartload of microwaveable coffee bags, caffeine-loaded Jolt cola and single-serving Del Monte vegetables for free.

“When I’m going shopping on Friday, I take $350 with me and chances are I’ll be getting into my own funds before I get back,” McMath said.

Out-of-Town Stores

He shuns air travel so he can visit more out-of-town grocery stores in search of unusual products. He is an avid traveler who once loaded so many groceries into a 28-foot motor home that his children could not fit in the back.

“Anywhere I go, I shop,” he said.

While McMath’s collection of failed products is not open to the public, his main showroom would be a sure hit among curious tourists and students studying marketing and business management.

The New Products Showcase and Learning Center, as it is called, has some 5,000 items on display at all times. Another 75,000 items are neatly packed away by category in storerooms.

McMath is quick to provide commentary on why certain products are hits while others traveled to his museum to die.

Moth-Repelling Wash

The Expello moth-repelling wash for woolens was a good idea, McMath said, but there is not enough wool clothing sold to support too many Woolite-like products.

Kimberly Clark’s Avert viricidal tissues were introduced with much fanfare in the Northeast as a way to keep cold germs from spreading. The tissues apparently worked, but were expensive and looked the same as normal Kleenex tissues.

“There was no way of differentiating them over normal tissues,” said McMath, who recommended the manufacturer supply small hand-packs for people to carry with them.

Toaster french fries “tasted like sawdust” and powdered instant yogurt was destined to die because of the wide availability of fresh yogurt, McMath said.

In one extraordinarily expensive marketing goof, McMath said, Nestle spent $100 million to $250 million in 1980-81 to push its New Cookery line of 36 foods, ranging from pudding to stew to salad dressing.

Hostile Competition

The low-salt, low-sugar, low-fat line was kept out of the diet foods area in stores, competing with hostile and well-established companies that lowered prices in retaliation to the Nestle threat.

“The line failed,” McMath said. “The name (New Cookery) connoted work. We think they missed with the name. And the package didn’t stand out.”

Nestle’s parent company, not wanting to take up any more space on McMath’s failed product shelves, rebounded with the extremely popular Lean Cuisine line of frozen dinners.

“Sometimes you learn from failures,” McMath said.