Just added a few things to the site today. First off, we've got a
very cool new picture in the gallery of Ray "The Bison" Meduna
competing in the sweet corn event earlier this year, thanks to the
man himself. Also, I've added six new articles to the Files
section, bringing up the total to 62 competitive eating articles. I
found this one, published last week by the Tacoma News-Tribune
particularly interesting. A writer's humorous (albeit somewhat
unethical!) attempt to start up an eating contest in his hometown.





Copyright 2004 The News Tribune
The News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington)

September 17, 2004, Friday

SECTION: South Sound; Pg. D01

LENGTH: 1330 words

HEADLINE: Get your belly ready for some competitive eating

BYLINE: Dan Voelpel, The News Tribune

BODY:
How many pieces of Cashew Roca can you eat in six minutes?

Do you think you could out-eat Eric "Badlands" Booker? First,
consider that Badlands
holds the following world records:

* Forty-nine Krispy Kreme hot glazed doughnuts in eight minutes.

* Fifty Hamentaschen, the traditional Jewish Purim cookies, in six
minutes.

* Two pounds of candy - Snickers, Milky Way and 3 Musketeers
minibars - in six
minutes.

Wednesday, Badlands Booker will fly to Los Angeles where he'll
battle Ray "The Bison"
Meduna of Mount Vernon and others in the first Winchell's World
Donut Eating
Championship.

Badlands - all 420 pounds of him - knows his sweets.

But before this month, the man ranked No. 4 in the world by the
International Federation
of Competitive Eating had never heard of Almond Roca or Brown &
Haley or the
Tacoma candymaker's newest innovation, Cashew Roca.

Neither did the top dogs at the IFOCE in New York know anything
about 92-year-old
Brown & Haley or its fine confections.

So I FedEx'd two tubs of Cashew Roca - one to Badlands Booker's home
in Copiagne,
N.Y., the other to David Baer, the IFOCE director of global
expansion, in New York
City.

What better way, I thought, to promote Cashew Roca and showcase
Tacoma than making
Roca a centerpiece of the world's fastest growing sport -
competitive eating?

Badlands Booker, upon sampling from the package, endorsed the idea.

"The candy is delicious," he raved. "It would make a good,
challenging contest in my
opinion. If you decide to go further with it, you can count me in."

Maybe you saw Badlands set the world candy-eating record. He did it
on an MTV
Halloween special, eating 64 Fun-size bars made by Mars, Inc. -
coincidentally a
company founded in Tacoma in 1911 in the home kitchen of Frank and
Ethel Mars.

"I had a little sugar rush afterwards," Badlands said. "But I had a
lot of energy, too."

George Shea, vice president of the IFOCE, immediately sensed the
Roca opportunity.
(Note: The big bucket of Cashew Roca reportedly disappeared soon
after it arrived at
IFOCE headquarters. Executives discovered it hidden under a baseball
cap on the
receptionist's desk.)

"You've got that buttercrunch thing going on rather than a nougat.
That's unique," Shea
said. "It's the kind of thing we'd love to do, and we are very good
at what we do."

What the IFOCE does is organize and gain international media
attention for competitive-
eating events from asparagus to zucchini.

"We'd bring in our superstars. Maybe find a local (Roca-eating) hero
whose back is
against the wall. Recognize it as a world championship," Shea said.

"We'd send a host, color commentators. It's an entertainment event.
Ninety minutes of
elaborate pageantry."

For a sanctioned world championship with travel expenses and
appearance fees for six to
eight top-ranked eaters, prize money and venue costs, Shea estimated
a Tacoma event
would cost between $ 15,000 to $ 20,000 - a relative pittance in the
world of candy
advertising and promotion.

Is your mouth watering yet? Well, hold your appetite just one
minute. I should have
asked the good folks at Brown & Haley first.

Brown & Haley never intended to spend a penny on advertising or
promotion for Cashew
Roca. They just plan to ship it out and "let it grow on the quality
of word of mouth," said
Pierson Clair, president and CEO.

Worse yet, Clair said, a competitive eating gorge-a-thon would hurt
the company rather
than help it. Since Almond Roca's invention in 1923, the company has
built an image of
Roca "as a high-grade, premium, sophisticated confection" meant for
consumers to enjoy
slowly.

"It's the law of unintended consequences." Clair said. "Roca is not
a 'gobble' candy like
M&Ms. . . . This (Cashew Roca) is high-grade stuff. It's not just a
cram-as-much-as-you-
can-down-your-throat kind of stuff."

An eating competition "would damage my brand, and I have to guard
the quality of my
brand and how people felt about it," he said.

Three independent marketing experts agreed Brown & Haley must ensure
any promotion
reinforces the image it wants people to have of its candy.

"I think it is a legitimate concern," said Shannon Kavanaugh,
founder and president of
Go-To-Market Strategies in Seattle. "I can't weigh in to say if a
competitive-eating
contest is a good idea or a bad idea for them.

"Certainly, publicity is great. Widespread publicity is even
greater. But if it
communicates the wrong thing to the wrong people, then it does them
no good. It can, in
fact, damage their brand."

"I think there's two schools of thought on this," said Ira James,
vice president of
marketing for Winchell's Donuts. "The brand image is important, and
you have to worry
whether (an event) adds or detracts from brand image. . . . Every
individual marketer has
to make their own decision.

"But people are people. They have a sense of humor. It's hard to
imagine someone's
going to stop eating Almond Roca because of an eating contest."

Besides, said Kurt Jacobson, president and senior strategist of
Tacoma-based
communications consultancy JayRay, the image of Roca as "precious"
has shifted a bit
over the years.

"At one time, it really was precious," Jacobson said. "One piece of
Almond Roca was a
big deal . . . until we started getting huge tins of them at
Christmas."

I remember hiding the gold-foil wrappers in my pocket so Mom
wouldn't know how
many I'd taken from her candy dish.

"I'm sure there's a way to make (the contest) a tongue-in-cheek
event and still present it in
a way that protects their brand," Kavanaugh said.

"To a degree, we have this issue with every food brand," said Baer
of the IFOCE.

When Mickey Mantle's, a New York restaurant, worried about
associating their food with
competitive eating, the IFOCE structured an event for competitors to
eat a Thanksgiving
meal - turkey, stuffing, potatoes - with a knife and fork.

The IFOCE hosts events with other foods - lobster, shrimp, oysters,
asparagus,
cheesecake, fruitcake - often considered high-quality, small-portion
delicacies.

For Cashew Roca, Baer said, the IFOCE would wrap the event in an air
of elegance. He
would dress his superstars in formal, black-tie attire and make them
unwrap each piece
from the blue foil.

"This would not be a gross-out event for 14-year-olds," he said.

Thanks to some serendipity and the City of Tacoma, we landed the
perfect date and
venue: Sunday, Nov. 14, in the grand ballroom of the new Greater
Tacoma Convention &
Trade Center.

All free to Brown & Haley, and free for us to watch. Doug Miller,
former city
councilman and president of Impression Productions, has the contract
to organize the
Nov. 13-14 public open house at the new convention center.

The ballroom, decorated for a black-tie ball the night of Nov. 13,
could stay decorated for
the upscale Cashew Roca eating competition the next day, Miller said.

"Aside from the promotional value (Brown & Haley) might get from an
open
competition, because we've got an open house, they might want to do
some sampling
with a piece of Cashew Roca for each person coming into the
convention center," Miller
said. "I imagine that's got to be of value to them. I could give
them a free booth to sell
their products as Christmas presents."

Ah, Christmas. The biggest sales season of the year for Brown &
Haley. But without the
company's consent, alas, the Cashew Roca World Eating Championship
from Tacoma
won't happen.

"We're very, very negative on it," Clair said.

Unless . . .

"What about an eating competition featuring your Mountain Bars?" I
asked. "Weren't
they once known as Mount Tacoma bars?"

"Ah, Mountain Bars," he said. "That's a different story. They're
soft. They're fun. They're
enjoyed by many people. They have a long history."

Maybe we'll host a world-eating championship after all.

So how many Mountain Bars do you think you can eat in six minutes?

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@...

LOAD-DATE: September 18, 2004