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BUSINESS PROFILE A COMPANY DEDICATED TO DOING GOOD — WITH CANDY
or scrolled through Amazon, and he wanted them to be impressed when they tasted Project 7’s candies. The new approach worked. Merrick formulated products with flavors that people loved. It started with mint gum that tasted great and had a flavor that actually lasted. Then, he moved into other categories, like organic gummy bears, sour ropes, lollipops, and sweet-and-spicy chews. Project 7 even developed lines of gourmet gummy bears, such as their “Brunch Club” gummies with flavors like sparkling rosé, sparkling mimosa, and mojito mambo. But as great as the products were, they weren’t the driving force behind the company. That was the act of giving back. With the new products’ success, Merrick could turn his attention to his true passion: doing good. Project 7 gives back to “seven areas of need.” They are: Save the Earth, House the Homeless, Feed the Hungry, Quench the Thirsty, Heal the Sick, Teach Them Well, and Hope for Peace. You can learn more about these missions at Project7.com. In each area of need, Project 7 works with different organizations around the world. For instance, when it comes to “Feed the Hungry,” they’ve helped donate over 4 million meals through various food banks in the U.S. For “Heal the Sick,” they’ve worked with several nonprofits that provide medical assistance to communities in Africa struck with malaria. The list of nonprofits Profit 7 works with is extensive. There were a few bumps in the road, but Merrick persevered. He wanted to see his vision of social entrepreneurship and sustainable giving come to life, and he did! But it all started with products consumers actually wanted to buy. He differentiated and cut into the market. Consumers responded, and Project 7 is able to spend millions of dollars each year just doing good.
As Merrick began to develop his early products, namely an all-natural gum, he needed to find partners to carry them. He initially found a partnership with Whole Foods, but it wasn’t meant to be. Whole Foods made one order, and that was it. There were no more orders. Consumers weren’t connecting with this new “all-natural” gum because it didn’t taste good. When flavor is a fundamental component of gum, your product has to be spot-on. People have expectations about how gum should taste, and you have to meet, and hopefully even exceed, these expectations. That’s the No. 1 thing that can make or break a product or a business. Meeting consumer expectations is something every business wrestles with. If you can’t satisfy customers, they’ll move on to the next thing, and you will have failed. Tyler Merrick failed. Whole Foods and others who had tried his product didn’t hold back. They told him it was genuinely awful, which is something no business owner wants to hear. But this was the reality check Merrick needed. Through this process, he also learned that this challenge isn’t uncommon. In the natural gum market, every gum maker has dealt with this problem. Flavor, it turns out (and texture, to a lesser extent), is hard to get just right with gum made from all-natural ingredients. “Everybody’s palate has been trained for high- intensity sweetener and long-lasting gum, and anything else is seen as inferior,” Merrick said when speaking with Forbes. He had a lot to contend with, but his mind was set on becoming a force in the social entrepreneurial space. He couldn’t give up. Merrick developed new products with flavors and colors that popped. He wanted to get people’s attention as they browsed the candy aisle at Target
Tyler Merrick knows entrepreneurship. He grew up around Merrick, a small pet-food
business established by his father, Garth, in their home before eventually joining the business himself. Then, in 2008, with everything he had learned from his family, he started his own business: Project 7. Merrick thought he had a pretty good grasp on entrepreneurship when he established Project 7. The Merrick pet food brand was built on the idea of making high-quality products out of fresh, high- quality ingredients. Basically, every product carried an ingredient list that everyone could understand. Merrick founded Project 7 with the same idea in mind. Of course, Project 7 had nothing to do with pet food. Rather, it was all about candy, but this candy was unlike most of what you might find on store shelves. Merrick wanted something different, something meaningful. Project 7, based in San Clemente, California, is a company built on social entrepreneurship, or conscious capitalism. According to its website, the company uses its annual profits to “help support seven areas of basic humanitarian need both domestically and abroad. We have a mandate to give a minimum of 10% of our profits annually but historically have been at 30–50% of our profits.” The idea was to create a sustainable giving model by creating a product people wanted and using the profits to do good in the world. But the early days of Project 7 were fraught with challenges, and the concept of the sustainable giving model seemed just out of reach.
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