Corporations have work to do

The suspicion that Corporate America was beginning to struggle came not after a huge stock market plunge, but after a trip to the grocery store I took some years ago.
Going down the condiments aisle, I feasted my eyes on two new niche products: a jar of peanut butter with jelly already mixed in and a bottle of green ketchup.
I scoffed and shook my head and thought to myself that companies must be racking their brains to come up with profitable products.
Those curiosities sat on shelves without selling for a long, long time, as I recall, but they weren't even the worst idea that ever came out.
My biggest marketing pet peeve ever was a single-serving box of cereal that was touted in commercials as being super-easy to serve and eat.
The tack that the obviously desperate ad people took to promote this bad idea involved showing a man having to harvest his own wheat from a field with a scythe in order to have a morning meal.
As if it's so difficult to tip a big box of cereal over a bowl and add milk. Nobody bought the marketing campaign or the item.
Now that all the viable ideas have been exploited, I would recommend to the corporate world that they look inward for improvement.
Instead of striking out into the realm of the outlandish, companies need work on the “consumability” of their products.
Unpopular items that languish on shelves forever help no one — and they certainly won't help companies grow their bottom lines.
Think of all the resources, time and energy that went into those ridiculous products.
The one redeeming value of green ketchup is that the bottle it came in was probably recyclable.
Not so for other more popular items like yogurt and pudding cups or plastic wrap or grocery bags or meat and deli packaging or cottage cheese containers.
It's time that businesses reassess their assembly lines, finished products and corporate culture and become better resource stewards to help make their products more consumer- and earth-friendly.
Some suggestions:
• End single servings and supersize packaging.
Instead of putting pudding into all those small unrecyclable containers, just make one bigger container with the same amount of stuff in it.
Let moms everywhere spoon out a serving of dessert onto a bowl or into a reusable container that goes in a lunchbox.
While each bottle in a soft drink six-pack can be processed into something new, the packaging that holds them together cannot.
One big package will eliminate that waste.
• Put all food products in recyclable containers.
To enhance the benefits and avoid the negative impact of the aforementioned pudding cups, make sure that all of those larger sized containers come in No. 1- and No. 2-type plastics, the only two of seven kinds that consistently can go to recycling — if the consumer puts them in the right place!
Many times eggs will come in a plastic foam kind of container, even though the cardboard kind works just as well AND can be recycled.
• Research and develop.
If you can't find the correct fit for your product in terms of packaging, support research and development to find alternatives.
The need for more biodegradable packaging, which you can throw on your compost pile, comes to mind.
• Back recycling programs with corporate spending.
The more companies buy recycled material to make products out of, the more economical it will be and the more it will encourage.
Consumers can help, of course.
One way is by boycotting those things that can't be reused.
I've stopped buying food storage baggies because of their single-use nature. Just about everything that gets stored in my refrigerator goes into reusable containers made for that very purpose.
With the rising tide of green-awareness, corporations stand to gain free publicity and attention and more sales, I would argue, by reducing the impact of packaging.
There’s no value in creating a useless product that there’s no demand for, that a corporation will have to spend millions of marketing dollars on to try to persuade the public that they’ve “got to have one.”
By helping consumers allay concerns about the waste they create, that’s the way to profitability.