Do-It-Yourself Food Licensing

Cartoon courtesy of CT Yoon

Pitching a major restaurant brand the other day, I ended up speaking with their "licensing maven." It turns out the chain has been dipping their toe in the water by extending their brand through some non-core menu items at retail. The lady was very bright, but clearly was learning on the job, having come over to the brand from the financial services sector (no comment you wags!). As we discussed leveraging the chain's equity to retail and my firm's interest in representing them, it was immediately obvious she knows little or nothing about the food industry and was trying to pump me for information about how Burger King was doing this with their hugely successful chip license. Were we using brokers or trade reps to place the products? How did we get the chips into vending machines?

First of all, I can't give you free consultation in an area where Broad Street Licensing Group has its breand & butter business. Our firm has an extensive list of proprietary contacts, information sources, and years of doing this sort of thing every day. It reminds me of the in-house counsels who think because they've put together a few licensing agreements they know how to do licensing.

Sorry, but unless you've come out of one of the studios or TV networks where licensing is a major component of their business, you likely have only the most limited knowledge of the industry and licensing contracts.

But I digress.

When it comes to food licensing, the licensor is never responsable for product placement unless you're using a co-packer to extend your brand directly as some companies do, mostly because they only want a few close-in products on retail shelves. But if you're looking to do a really impactful leveraging of your brand to retail, what the hell do you know about the grocery business? Do you understand slotting fees, ANSI, DSD, ACV, trade deductions, forward buys, FIFO, COOL, bunkers, branch houses, transfers, or application identifiers? If not, you might want to re-think doing it yourself.

Remember the old legal adage how a man who represents himself has a fool for a client.

So when she purred how "we're going slowly so we do it right," I thought in my head "you're going slowly because you don't have a clue."