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Firefighter Fizzles
In 2004 Bello invested in Firefighter Brands, launching a line of snacks and drinks to capitalize on the popularity of the firefighter image following the September 11 terrorist attacks. That brand’s products included Hydrant Water and Courageous Cola, and the company promised to donate 25 percent of its profits to firefighter-related causes. But you won’t find the brand on shelves today, and the company’s website has gone dark.
Bello called Firefighter Brands an instance of “no good deed goes unpunished.” The brand idea worked, he said, but the company was beset by a number of problems. His departure from Pepsi barred him from working in the beverage side of the business, he said, which is where the focus of the brand fell, and he had a hard time corralling the divergent interests of full-time and volunteer firefighters.
But he also had a hard time pulling the whole idea together. While the brand started with a rollout of everything from potato chips and chili to bottled water and sports drinks, by the end it was apparent that the throw everything and see what sticks approach hadn’t worked. If the public had as much respect for firefighters in terms of potential brand equity as Bello says it did, then Firefighter’s execution was a colossal failure. If that potential was never there in the first place, it calls into question Bello’s ability to still pick a winner.
And another of Bello’s recent ventures – a line of soups and soup restaurants based on the inspiration for Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi,” a real life soup maker named Al Yeganeh – decided it would just plain be better off without him. Bello lost his post as CEO of The Original Soup Man World Renowned Soup last year. But Bello said he never wanted to be the company’s CEO. He said he took the post to drum up funding and publicity, and doesn’t have the time or will to be involved with Soup Man’s – or any other company’s – day to day operations. He already sits on several other boards and serves Sherbrooke by searching for the next big brand. But he still owns ten percent of Soup Man, sits on the company’s board and represents a large group of investors – which affords ?him a measure of influence.
But this raises another question about the Lizard King: Does the Bello Method work from a distance? He crafted SoBe in his own image by stationing himself on the front lines of the company’s store-to-store battles. Even at IZZE, he packaged the company for sale by sitting as the board’s chairman. But the battlefield looks different the farther you get away from it, and at Adina, Bello plans to send dispatches from the general’s bunker.
As for Soup Man, Bello said the company is in a period of adjustment, not unlike SoBe’s South Beach days. SoBe originally sold iced teas to an unreceptive marketplace before Bello rebranded the company as SoBe and introduced a new line of fruit and vegetable juice blends with splashes of herbs – many of the elements that would later surface in the emerging functional drink category. Similarly, The Original Soup Man is bending away from the franchise track and specializing in grocery-ready soups.