Rocky Mountain High Brands Inc (RMHB)

[scion]

Let's start with the easiest of our examples: tuna hot dogs.

The premise behind Texas-based Bounty of the Sea Inc. is simple. Almost everyone likes hot dogs. And almost everyone knows that fish is better for you than the stuff found in most frankfurters. So why not create a hot dog made out of tuna fish?

Jerry Grisaffi, a former car salesman, started Bounty of the Sea two years ago after learning of a Costa Rican invention that can take fish meat and shape it into forms traditionally reserved for other meats: bologna, breakfast sausages, and yes, hot dogs. The beauty of the process -- from Grisaffi's point of view -- is that it removes the fishy smell and leaves you with a healthy white meat that can take the place of fatty, calorie-riddled beef or pork. Not only would tuna-based foods be perfect for people on restricted diets, thought Grisaffi, but it was a natural for a health-conscious America.

"When you think about what we have here, it blows your mind," says Grisaffi, 41, from his office in Sugar Land, just outside of Houston. "We have the makings of a great new industry. I can see this being a $300-million company within five years."

Maybe, but at the moment, Bounty of the Sea is still $300 million short. Although Grisaffi has raised $1.2 million, it has taken him almost two years to line up distribution (it will be test-marketed in Houston), perfect the shaping process (for the longest time the company had problems eliminating the fish smell), and perhaps most important, get people to take it seriously.

"If you go up to a woman in a bar and tell her what you do for a living, you get a lot of strange looks," says John Dudley Mosele, Bounty of the Sea's marketing man.

And that quizzical reaction is a hurdle that may be impossible to overcome. Although Mosele and Grisaffi talk with pride of taste tests that showed 84% of the people who sampled the fish dogs liked them, there's a big gap between getting someone to say nice things about something they got for free and getting them to purchase it.

"Their problem, quite simply, is the name," says Stew Leonard, chairman of Stew Leonard's, in Norwalk, Conn., probably the country's most successful supermarket. Leonard boasts that he sells more Perdue chickens than anyone, yet he doesn't carry Perdue's chicken franks or its turkey franks. "Most people are put off when you tell them a hot dog has chicken or turkey in it," he explains.

And if they don't like hot dogs based on chicken and turkey -- foods that sell far better than tuna fish -- what chance do tuna dogs have?

Missions Impossible
Profile of three start-up companies and their experiences in marketing new products.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19890101/5505.html