Relax Popeye. You’ll get yer spinach back.
Consumers pledge allegiance to brands. When a brand has problems, no matter what the root cause, the brand organization suffers financially. While a growing number of Americans have made a pledge to eat healthier, no single spinach grower is going to suffer unduly as a result of the recent outbreak of E. Coli. Why? Spinach is a vegetable, not a brand. Any allegiance we have to spinach is to the vitamins on the inside, not the name on the plastic bag outside. While spinach growers and distributors will definitely take a financial hit from this very unfortunate situation, no single brand will be held liable. It will cut across the industry, mitigating the effect. This is not like the Tylenol package tampering scare where a specific brand bore the brunt of the headache. In that case we were able to turn to other remedies for our own headaches. (In that case, Tylenol’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, set the standard for appropriate brand behavior in a crisis. It took the company time to recover but, as a result of its actions, respect for and loyalty to the brand soared. For those too young to remember, check your brand management textbooks.) If you’re looking for an excuse not to eat your spinach, baby, you don’t have much time left. As soon as science gets to the root cause of the problem and the media gives us the okay, spinach will be back in the produce section. While we won’t necessarily look for any one brand, the industry will recover, as a whole. We’ll be free to sauté, toss, and make our spanikopita. And, in your case Popeye, you can just chug the stuff.