Encore: Diet Wars | Reaching for the Stars | 3

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's the early 1990s and the diet boom is over. Weight Watchers is now a millstone around Heinz's neck, Jenny Craig's advance has stalled, and Nutri/System's bankrupt and broken.

Faced with tanking sales, the diet giants home need new tricks to get people back on their weight-loss plans. And soon all three are homing in on the same answer – paying celebrities big bucks to convince the public that they're just a diet away from happiness.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A note to listeners, the material in this episode covers the weight loss industry and diet culture,
0:06.0	which could be upsetting for some people.
0:08.6	This series originally aired exclusively on Wundery Plus in 2022.
0:13.3	Wundery!
0:22.3	March 1994, the World Trade Center, New York City.
0:27.3	In a conference room on the 44th floor of the North Tower, Heinz Chairman Tony O'Reilly
0:32.7	takes a deep breath and steps up to the podium.
0:36.8	In front of him are 250 Wall Street analysts, and they all think he's finished.
0:44.0	O'Reilly turned Heinz into one of the biggest corporate success stories of the 1980s,
0:49.1	and much of that growth came from Weight Watchers.
0:52.5	But now, Weight Watchers is on its knees, and Heinz is flagging.
0:58.8	I know what you're all wondering. Is the downturn at Heinz going to be an enduring problem?
1:04.0	My objective today is to show you that it's temporary.
1:08.8	For the next hour, O'Reilly battles for his career.
1:12.6	He explains how Heinz is fixing its core operations,
1:16.9	but he knows that what these analysts really want
1:19.9	is for Heinz to offload Weight Watchers and stick to food.
1:24.3	But O'Reilly still believes in the weight loss brand.
1:28.3	Weight Watchers' attendance dropped for four years straight after we bought it in 1978.
1:33.9	We've seen lows before. It took us until 83 to get the formula right.
1:38.8	But once we did, this happened.
1:41.9	O'Reilly brings up a graph showing Weight Watchers' attendance, shooting higher and higher
	...

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