Before I had a chance to digest this conundrum, my tour guides raced onward at warp speed. Perhaps the GPG secret to profitability was doing everything at a breakneck pace. “Our marketing department is formidable,” Smith chatted as I labored to match his strides. “But I also want to show you something else. Usually, there’s at least one session going on.” He waved me into a darkened room.
Smythe brought up the rear, tiptoeing in and closing the door behind us. “This is where we hold focus groups,” he whispered.
One wall of the glorified closet we’d entered was entirely taken over by an oversize window made of one-way glass. In the adjacent room, a group of casually dressed women about my age sat around a conference table, sipping coffee. At the head of the table, a woman in a lime green suit held up an unfamiliar cereal box.
Smythe pressed a button on the wall, and the conversation from next door was piped through to our side of the magic mirror.
“Now,” said the lime-jacketed leader, “I’d like to hear your thoughts, comparing the last package to this one. Would you be inclined to assume—given the picture—that this product was more or less wholesome than the previous one?”
The women tilted their heads to one side, scrutinizing the photograph of cereal flakes in a bowl, with milk. I realized there was no text at all on the box the woman held—just graphics.
Smythe whispered an explanation. “Consumers, we have found, form very substantive opinions about a product just from the colors used on the packaging.”
My eyes went wide with fascination. The box and the cereal pictured were both reddish brown, the bowl and the berries were blue, the milk was white as the driven snow.
Could it be that most shoppers made a hasty, subconscious decision about whether or not to buy my product simply based on the color of the package? Could it be that Julia’s Child was sending the wrong signals straight into harried mothers’ brains from the freezer shelf? Or the right ones?
“Ms. Bailey?” Smith whispered to me, his hand on the doorknob.
But I didn’t budge. I was desperate for the women to hurry up and tell me how they felt about the reddish brown box.
“It reminds me . . . ,” began one of the participants.
“Julia?” Smythe prompted. “We’d like you to meet the CECO now.”
“Of chocolate milk,” the woman said. “And I don’t serve chocolate milk, at least not at breakfast.”
Reluctantly, I followed Smythe and Smith into the corridor. I was suffering from sensory overload thanks to the whirlwind meeting and cyclone tour. I wished Smith and Smythe would forget me for a half hour in another one of their numerous conference rooms, so I could remember my own name and figure out what I was doing here.
But they had other plans. Smith was actually rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “And here we are, Ms. Bailey, at the office of the special executive in charge of eco-issues. It is very fortunate that he’s not traveling today, since I can’t imagine anyone at GPG with whom you’d be more eager to talk.” Smith knocked on an office door. Through the glass I could see a man on the phone. He was dressed with neither the formality of my deal-making tour guides nor the casual garb of the marketing people. He was in the middle—khaki gabardine trousers and a crisply ironed shirt of green and white checks. He wore fashionably retro horn-rimmed glasses. He waved at us, motioning that we should enter.
Smith opened the door and gestured for me to take a seat. I slid quietly into a chair.
“Yes, we want to get as much mileage out of it as we can,” the man said into his telephone. “But it doesn’t make sense to label a product both as ‘locally sourced’ and ‘fair trade.’ The brand manager is going to have to choose which virtue best serves the brand’s narrative.”
I glanced around the office. Instead of the standard-issue corporate furnishings, everything in this office was aggressively eco-friendly. The desk was bamboo butcher block. On its surface sat one of those trendy Swiss aluminum water bottles. A sign posted over the laser printer in the corner commanded, “Think Before You Print.” And the wall decor included a “Go Green” page-a-day calendar.
Next to my chair sat a familiar end table. I’d seen it in the Pottery Shed catalog. It consisted of a solid stump from a tree, perhaps sixteen inches across. The bark had been sanded off, revealing luscious wood grain. The varnish was supposedly an ecologically friendly mix of beeswax and linseed oil.
I’d coveted that table myself, before I’d checked the price. It was $249 dollars. “Crafted from fallen wood. No two alike!” bragged the catalog copy. But in Vermont, we paid about half that much for a cord of seasoned firewood standing eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high. The Pottery Shed must make a pretty penny selling stumps.
His conversation over, the stump’s owner hung up his phone and flashed us a winning smile. “J. P.! Who have you brought me today?”
“Ralph,” Smith began. “I’d like you to meet Ms. Julia Bailey. Her company makes organic food for the preschool demographic. I think you’ll find that her interests and yours are very much aligned. And Ms. Bailey—”
“Please, call me Julia.”
“Julia, Ralph DaSilva is our new CECO.”
I held out my hand to shake. “Um, seeko?” I asked. My growing exhaustion was evident in my less-than-brilliant greeting.
Ralph DaSilva stood up to shake my hand and let out a braying laugh. “I’m the CEO of all things ‘eco’ here at GPG. So that makes me the CECO, get it?”
“Ah.” I gave him a stiff smile. “So it’s your job to monitor the ecological impact of the food brands?”
“Of all the brands at GPG, actually,” he corrected. “But I’d say I’m really the earth’s advocate. That’s my role.”
“Ralph,” Smith broke in, “can you spare twenty minutes? I’ll leave you two to chat.” Smith looked at his watch.
“Certainly!” The CECO beamed, waving off my host. “Julia,” he said graciously, turning back to me, “with a business focused on organic products, I’m sure you have a lot of questions for me. You must be wondering how you can entrust your organic business to a massive conglomerate like GPG. Right?”
The bluntness of this observation caught me off guard. “Well . . .” I was tentative. “The thought had crossed my mind. Surely not every brand at GPG has a history of . . . ecological compassion and sensitivity?”
“And it’s my job to fix that!” DaSilva boomed. “I want GPG to be known as the most environmentally friendly organization on earth.”
His enthusiasm was encouraging. But I wondered how he could really expect to give Greenpeace a run for its money. It totally made sense from a PR perspective to have a “CECO.” But it also made sense for a corporation with thousands of shareholders to try to appear eco-friendly rather than to actually be eco-friendly.
“So . . .” I decided to test him. “That means you’ll be switching every single food brand over to organic practices?”
He laughed, and I narrowed my eyes. Because I hadn’t been joking. I’m on to you, buddy, I thought.
He stopped smiling. “I hope so, Julia,” was his answer. “But a complete conversion will take years. Imagine what would happen if we did that next week. I’m sure you realize that the unintended result would be GPG pricing its brands right out of the grocery store. That would, in turn, bankrupt the company, helping nobody. But I’m preaching to the choir here, right? You surely feel those same market forces pressing upon you every day.”
I swallowed hard. “True enough,” I conceded. My opinion of GPG and DaSilva was whipping back and forth like a tennis ball at Wimbledon. After all, my failure to properly consider the bottom line was what brought me into the jaws of a conglomerate in the first place.
“But let’s take a look at your product.” DaSilva flipped open a file that Smythe had handed him. It contained pictures of my product labels. “Let’s see . . . Cute titles. And organic, of course,” he said. “Recycled packaging. Excellent, Julia! Do you also use
soy-based inks?”
I shook my head. It was too expensive.
“Hybrid delivery trucks?” he asked.
Picturing Lugo’s ancient truck nearly caused me to snort with laughter. “Uh, no. But since I use locally sourced ingredients, our carbon footprint shrinks by an even wider margin.”
“Touché, Julia!” Ralph DaSilva seemed delighted by our round of eco-jujitsu. “But there’s always something more we could do, isn’t there? No grocery store product on earth can claim to be a hundred percent green. It’s our job—yours and mine—to burnish the ship as well as we can without sinking it. Right?”
Across his bamboo desk, I stared hard at Ralph DaSilva. It was going to be trickier than I imagined, figuring out if his real role at the company was to be its conscience or its greenwasher in chief.
“Now, Julia, what’s your line?”
“My what?”
DaSilva frowned. “Here at GPG we’re very focused on each brand. Every single one of them can be summed up in a single sentence. One line. Inside these walls we believe that if a brand cannot be summed up well in one line it’s likely unmarketable. Fair enough?”
I gaped at him, wishing for the first time in my life that I’d gone to business school. This must be the sort of thing a person learned in business school. How to sum up the enormity of one’s ambitions in a single phrase.
“So dazzle me, Julia. What’s your line?”
My mouth was dry. The only word that flashed through my feeble brain at the point was “organic.” I was just about to utter some drivel about how good organic food was for kids when I had a flash of recollection. My “line” had been handed to me on a platter a few months ago. In an elevator no less.
I cleared my throat. “Julia’s Child”—I made my fingers into quotation marks—“ ‘Saving the world one little bite at a time.’ ”
“Wow!” DaSilva leapt out of his chair and reached for my hand. He pumped it up and down. “Terrific! Just wonderful. I can tell you’ve really done your homework on GPG.” He paced excitedly back and forth in front of his desk. “So tell me about your audience, Ms. Bailey. Exactly who is she?”
“She’s . . .” I hesitated. I was beginning to understand that big companies like GPG played the game on another level, with sophisticated market research at their fingertips. I had none, except what I’d gleaned chatting up mothers in Brooklyn. So I decided just to describe myself. “She’s a mother,” I told him. “A mother who wants to do the right thing—for her children and also for the environment. But she doesn’t always have enough time to make everything from scratch, so she’s hoping to find a shortcut here and there.”
“Continue.” DaSilva leaned back in his desk chair. It was a colorful modern design, one of those new ones fabricated from recycled water bottles.
“She’s . . . got sufficient discretionary income, at least for food. And food and health issues are important to her. She’s heard about the Prius, of course—”
“She drives a Prius?”
“No, because you can’t drive carpool in a Prius.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I see your point. Julia, that’s absolutely a customer that we’d like to add to the GPG family. I can see why J. P. likes your product so much.”
“I can deliver her,” I said solemnly. “I understand her needs. And her fears.”
“I’ll bet you do, Julia. I bet you do. So let’s really think outside the box for a moment, okay? Let’s go off the reservation. What is the single most ecologically friendly thing you can think of that Americans could do with regard to babies and children?”
It was an easy question. “Diapers.” I smiled. “They could use cloth diapers, at least in the major metropolitan areas where diaper delivery services are available. The landfill reduction would be staggering.”
DaSilva put his feet up on his bamboo desk. “Diapers are a big one,” he said. “I’m happy that here at GPG we don’t make them. Because, of course, there is so little I could do to improve them.”
I knew what he meant. Consumers were not about to switch back en masse to cloth. They just weren’t going back to the era of scraping stinky poop into the toilet and then either washing or balling up the offending cloth diaper and dropping it into a smelly plastic can to await its pickup.
“That’s not it, though, you know.”
“It’s not?” I asked.
“Nope. That’s not the most ecologically effective thing American families could do.”
“Well, are you going to tell me what is?”
“The most ecologically significant change Americans could make would be to stop having children at all.” He winked at me. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s true. The world is flooded with children, many of them hungry. If we care so much about the environment, it would be the most effective stance.”
“But that violates the life force!” I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding.
“Of course it does,” he said quietly. “And that’s our challenge, isn’t it? Those of us who care about the environment. I care very much about the environment, whether or not you believe me. But I work at a company that exists to sell products. And the best way to be green with regard to products is to simply buy fewer of them. But I can’t possibly advocate that, right?”
I began to feel dizzy. “Of course.”
“Instead, I put concentrated laundry detergent into smaller bottles, and I make sure that our yogurt is packaged in BPA-free vessels, you got me?”
I nodded.
“The shareholders essentially sign my check every month, and that’s not going to change. If they don’t make a return on their investment, I’ll eventually be fired. So my best course of action, then, is to convince the firm that we can do well by doing good—that consumers will favor us with their dollars because they approve of our actions.”
“But does that mean if the green frenzy dies down GPG will change your title and cease to care about the environment?”
“What a cynical girl you are!” He laughed. “I like you, Julia. Because you’re an idealist, but you also have your eyes open. So I’m sure you realize that your choice is to either bring your brand to the big corporation, where you will lose some amount of control over it, or to go it alone and never make a dime of profit.”
I gulped. Were those really the only two choices?
“If you join us here, I promise you’ll have the opportunity to set the new standard for consciousness! You could help me, Julia. You could be a force for good at GPG.”
There was a tap on the door. Smythe stuck his head in. “How are we doing?”
Ralph swung his feet off the desk and rose. “Where did you find this feisty entrepreneur, Smythe? She’s a firecracker.”
Smythe grinned. “So you found something to talk about?”
“Plenty. Didn’t we, Julia?”
I was just about to answer when Smythe said, “Hey! Is that the new xPhone?” He pointed at a sleek titanium device on the CECO’s desk.
“Yeah! It’s pretty great. I thought the G5 was awesome, but this one is even cooler.” He picked it up, touched something on the screen, and handed it to Smythe, whose face lit up.
I watched the two of them fondle the phone. Surely the CECO would have heard about unconscionable coltan mining? Wouldn’t he?
Smythe set the phone longingly down on the desk. “I’m supposed to walk Ms. Bailey back to Smith’s office now.”
“Later, man. And, Julia—it was truly a pleasure to talk policy with you. I do hope we can do it again in the very near future.” He shook my hand graciously.
I followed Smythe back through yet another corridor.
“There she is!” Smith said, appearing from inside an office. “Ms. Bailey, thank you so much for meeting with us today. If it’s okay with you, we’d like to learn even more about Julia’s Child. Can you have your lawyer draw up a nondisclosure agreement you can live with?”
Just as I began to process his request, my attention was drawn away by a s
eries of posters on the wall beside us. Each was a framed advertisement for food, obviously GPG brands. I recognized the California vintner Luke and I had spied on the GPG website and the premium ice cream. But one of the posters really caught my eye, because the picture was already so familiar to me.
It was an advertisement for the Zamwich.
I felt dizzy then, as if the merry-go-round had just sped up to twice the speed.
“Julia? Ms. Bailey? After we sign the nondisclosure agreement, we’ll be able to look at your books, orders, facility, products in development. That sort of stuff. Okay?”
Woozily, I forced myself to respond to Smith’s request for a second date. “My lawyer. Yes,” I stammered. “I’ll call you.”
“Excellent! Excellent. We like how you’re thinking, Julia. Good stuff.”
Still feeling light-headed, I allowed myself to be steered toward the elevators. My coat was produced and my hand was shaken a couple of more times, and then I was on my way back into the real world.
I rode the escalator toward street level. The corporate bees still buzzed around me, but the lunch bags had been replaced by afternoon coffee cups. Nobody wore a coat, in spite of the fact that autumn was firmly advancing toward winter. In corporate land, any human need could be met without leaving the building.
I pulled my coat tightly around me and headed for the revolving doors. I didn’t know if I could do it. Could I really sell out? Sell out. I tried out the words my head: I’m a sell out.
I sighed, stepping into the wind. First I had to get them to make me an offer. Then I would worry about the moral implications.
Chapter 21
On any other day, I might have rushed back to the office for two more hours of work. But with the business teetering between bankruptcy and corporate domination, I had reached a point where I could safely say that the additional effort wouldn’t make or break Julia’s Child.
So I went home, where, when I walked into the living room, I was treated to a look of joyful surprise from both Jasper and Wylie. And they were all too happy to ditch Bonnie for an unexpected excursion with me.
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