George Royer

Anatomy of a Dot-Com Failure: The Case of Online Grocer Webvan

In 2008, when CNET published its list of the top ten dot-com flops ever, online grocer Webvan topped the list. This chapter describes the rise and fall of Webvan, and analyzes the reasons for its failure. In particular, this case study demonstrates that Internet companies – contrary to what many entrepreneurs believed during the dot-com boom – are not immune to the basic laws of economics or sound business practice. Issues that are discussed include lack of knowledge of the grocery business, high efficiencies and low profit margins in the traditional grocery business, lack of consumer testing, inability to access a strong supplier market, cost of and problems with innovative and highly automated warehouses, the economics and logistics of home delivery, the “get big fast” philosophy of dot-com entrepreneurs, the failure of other early online grocers such as Kozmo and UrbanFetch, and the growth of successful online grocery businesses by such companies as Peapod and Tesco.

Food in the Internet Age

This book examines food in the United States in the age of the Internet. One major theme running through the book isbusiness opportunities and failures, as well as the harms to consumers and traditional brick-and-mortar companies that occurred as entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of the Internet to create online companies related to food. The other major theme is the concept of trust online and different models used by different companies to make their web presence seem trustworthy. The book describes a number of major food companies, including AllRecipes, Betty Crocker, Cooks Illustrated, Epicurious, Groupon, OpenTable, and Yelp. The book draws on business history, food studies, and information studies for its approach.

Formal and Informal Approaches to Food Policy

This chapter provides an overview of formal and informal approaches to food policy and gives examples of these approaches in the United States. Typically, a food policy issue will involve many interest groups, each with its own set of interests and organizational capabilities at getting across its message and influencing policy. Formal policy is by definition those formal actions taken by government bodies in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches—at the federal, state, and local levels. All other policy is informal, having the goal of influencing formal policy or influencing the behavior of private entities such as companies or members of the general public. Informal policy often involves various legal tactics to capture a voice in the food policy debates: boycotts, protests, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, strikes, work-to-rule, revelations, and teach-ins. Sometimes illegal means of civil disobedience are used as well: illegal boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, forbidden speech, threats to government officials, victimless crimes such as public nudity, riots, occupation of private property, denial of service attacks, information theft, and data leaks. The chapter provides many examples of both formal and informal efforts to influence food policy in the United States.

Food Policy During the Depression and the Second World War: FDR’s New Deal Legislation and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Bully Pulpit

This chapter analyzes the efforts by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to use the bully pulpit to influence U.S. food policy and considers the interactions of her informal policy efforts with the formal policy efforts of the New Deal administration of her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first section gives biographical information about Eleanor Roosevelt, describing how she became the most influential woman in America of her time. The second section considers food policy issues during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Topics include surplus food; food and nutrition education; policies involving employment, diet, and exercise; Social Security; food stamps; school lunches; planned communities; and model meals. The third section examines food policy of the first half of the 1940s, during the Second World War. Topics include kitchen appliances as war materiel, nutritional standards and habits, physical education, rationing and price controls, Victory Gardens, and Eleanor Clubs. A brief conclusion provides an overview of Eleanor Roosevelt’s role in influencing legislation, encouraging federal agencies to expand their food and health programs, changing food and exercise habits of individual Americans, providing coping strategies during times of stress, and offering messages of reassurance to the American public in times of stress.

On Cars and Food: Reflections on Sources for the Historical Study of Everyday Information Behavior

Historical approaches are beginning to be used in the study of everyday information behavior. The ideal sources for carrying out this kind of scholarship would be large bodies of correspondence or large numbers of diary entries that discuss particular everyday activities, spread across long periods of time. Given the general lack of availability of these kinds of sources, historically minded everyday information behavior scholars need to find alternative source materials to employ in their research, even if these sources give only indirect rather than direct information about individuals’ everyday information behavior. This article discusses a number of these alternative sources (consumer magazines, popular magazines, corporate marketing literature, guidebooks, reviews, and various kinds of advertising) and shows how they were used in historical studies on car buying and eating out in America.

Protecting Children from Obesity: A History of Television and Internet Food Advertising Regulation in the United States

This chapter provides a history of television and Internet food advertising regulation in the United States as a contribution to understanding the food policy developments concerning the protection of children from obesity. The analysis in this chapter is presented in five parts, following a roughly chronological account. The first section discusses efforts in the 1970s in which U.S. federal agencies attempted with limited success to regulate food advertising to children on television—first proposed to resolve an epidemic of tooth decay rather than an epidemic of obesity. The second section focuses on the following quarter century, during which the political climate had generally moved away from federal regulation. Practically the only regulation of food advertising during this era was self-regulation by industry. This period was characterized by weak regulatory efforts and growing problems with childhood obesity. The third section discusses the efforts during the first decade of the twenty-first century to find new ways to fight childhood obesity as it became increasingly apparent to the scientific community and the general public that the nation faced a serious problem. The final two sections examine two major risks to any of the proposed solutions to regulation of food advertising—one section discusses the argument by industry that companies have a First Amendment right to free commercial speech based on court decisions appearing between 1976 and 2001; the other section discusses the issues that arose as food advertising expanded into the new medium of the Internet. A short final section offers some conclusions.

American School Lunch Policy: A History

This chapter discusses policies concerning foods available to U.S. children in school, including policies about both government subsidized breakfasts and lunches and “competitive” foods such as those available in vending machines and school stores. The first section discusses government food programs, tracing the history from the middle nineteenth century to the present. This discussion includes not only the free and subsidized school lunch and breakfast programs available under the Child Nutrition Act, but also the Child and Adult Care Food Program; the Summer Food Service Program; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; and the food stamp program (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). The next section tells the history of the US Department of Agriculture evaluation of school lunches over time. The following section provides a critique of school lunches from interested private parties including Jamie Oliver, Sarah Wu, and Avis Richards. The chapter then turns to competitive foods, tracing the history of commercialism in American public schools from the nineteenth century. Particular attention is given to corporate-developed curricula employed in the public schools and “pouring rights” that locked in a school district to the sweetened drinks of a particular bottling company. The next section considers both formal and informal policy approaches to competitive foods in the schools, with particular attention to the efforts of former President Bill Clinton. The final section provides some conclusions about the efficacy of both formal and informal approaches to regulation of food in the public schools.

Food Policy Since 2009: The Obama Administration’s Policies and Michelle Obama’s Bully Pulpit

This chapter analyzes the efforts by First Lady Michelle Obama to use the bully pulpit to influence U.S. food policy and considers the interactions of her formal policy with the policy efforts of her husband, President Barack Obama. Topics include the White House Garden as a demonstration garden for healthy eating and an analysis of the four aspects of her Let’s Move campaign: Healthy Choices: better nutrition labeling, a revamped food pyramid, and regular monitoring of the body mass index (BMI) of children. Healthy Schools: reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act for improved school lunches and expansion of the Healthier US Schools Challenge, a 2004 initiative to recognize schools that are reaching certain goals concerning promotion of nutrition and physical education. Physical Activity: revamping the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge program and increasing participation; and enlisting professional athletes to encourage kids to exercise 60 min per day. Access to Affordable Healthy Food: eliminating urban and rural food deserts.

The Dark Side of Online Food Businesses: Harms to Consumers and Main Street Businesses

When faced with the extraordinary successes of Internet companies such as Amazon and Google and the advantages they provide to both their customers and affiliated businesses, it is perhaps difficult to see the harm that Internet-based companies can create. This chapter is intended to temper the sentiment about the virtues of the Internet. It examines three popular Internet-based, food-related companies and discusses how each has caused harm to either consumers or main-street businesses. More specifically, the chapter studies the restaurant reservations company OpenTable and how consumer expectations that restaurants will add online reservation systems burden restaurant owners with high costs and may harm the ambience of restaurants; the online coupon company Groupon and how businesses can be harmed by spikes in demand and changed expectations of consumers; and the restaurant reviewing company Yelp and how it can ruin the surprise factor for new patrons, lead to hostilities between owners and reviewers, and harm restaurants through unsavory sales practices.

Trust Online: From E-Commerce to Recipe Sharing

This chapter focuses on trust online. The first section briefly considers some of the earliest examples of unfair online community reviewing, especially ones that appear on the site of the online retailer Amazon. The bulk of the chapter is focused on the trustworthiness of recipes that are posted and shared online, presenting six models used to make readers trust recipes they find online: the community review model as represented by Allrecipes; the laboratory testing model as represented by Cook’s Illustrated; the scientific model as represented by Nathan Myrhvold, the Modernist Cuisine movement, and Alton Brown; the expert model as represented by the websites and blogs of ten professional chefs with well-trafficked websites; the corporate publishing model as represented by Epicurious, which reprints recipes formerly published in Gourmet or Bon Appetit magazines; and the corporate food products model as represented by the Betty Crocker brand of General Mills. The final section of the chapter looks at the information studies literature on trust, and how that literature addresses issues of trust in both restaurant reviewing and recipe sharing.