People Chow

I met a guy at a conference today from Nestlé, which owns Purina, as well as other prepared-food brands (e.g., Stouffer's and Buitoni). So I told him about a wacky idea I had a couple of months ago: People Chow.

The idea is basically this: sealed pouches of food pellets of a consistency somewhere between chewy and crunchy. Yes, more or less cat food. But for people! Mmmmm.

I haven't done the market research, so I don't know how much the meal-replacement bars and shakes market is (e.g., Balance Bar, Power Bar, etc.), but I'm guessing it's a few billion, not to mention a sliver of the salty snacks industry, which has to be huge.

Those foods fill a niche: snack bars and meal-replacement drinks are (nominally) nutritious snacks, and the salty snacks are simply yummy. But the bars and drinks are all sweet, and the salty snacks are crap nutritionally. Sometimes you don't have time for lunch or are hungry in the afternoon but you don't feel like chocolate peanut or yogurt berry, much less fatty-carbo junk.

What would really hit the spot sometimes — when you're rushing around on a business trip or hiking or biking or just at home watching TV and too lazy to cook — would be a neat pouch — which you could buy at a corner grocery or from a vending machine or at the store in boxes of ten packs — of crunchy/chewy chicken thing or beef thing or tuna thing. Something nutritionally balanced, tasty and munchable to stave off hunger till the next meal. In short, cat food for people.

Whether it would all be brown or tan nuggets or meaty pieces and potato pieces and carrot pieces and rice pieces I don't know; I'd leave that to R&D to sort out. Marketing it would be tricky. Should you do it straight-up ironic and package it like cat food or try to disassociate from the pet food comparison somehow? I'd be open to suggestions.

Anyway, I'm in no position to launch a food product on my own and I'm not going to spend a lot of time canvasing this around to get a piece of the action. Doubtful that Nestlé will do anything with it, but the guy liked the idea and said he'd mention it around and promised me nothing. Fair enough.

But for the record, if People Chow becomes a multi-billion-dollar product/category, you saw it here first.